Game Of Thrones : Season 7
by Mr. Bluu
Summary: Simply what I would've liked to happen in the show following Season 6.
1. Daenerys I

DAENERYS

The horizon breeds nothing. It stands at attention, glowing with crimson fire as the sun dips below it, but nothing comes forth. Westeros has eluded her thus far; a shadow on the wall, a crown of smoke. For seventeen years she's waited to see it crest that invisible line out in the sea, to watch the continent her ancestors' ancestors had conquered appear before her, blood-red dragon sails flapping above her like the wings of her very real dragons that heralded death for their mother's enemies.

And Daenerys, at the head of the greatest fleet ever seen in the Narrow Sea, upon the deck of her flagship Balerion, is denied again.

Night is coming, and Dorne has yet to break the horizon. Navigational theses drawn up by her Master of Ships, Yara Greyjoy, have been proven inaccurate. The anticipation builds in had built in Daenerys' chest for days now, contained tightly in her bones and flesh and painted Dothraki vest. She'd been urged to take up garb less alien to the people of Westeros, with the intent to make her transition to Queen of Westeros as painless as possible. Daenerys is quick to hotly remind her advisers, notably her Hand Tyrion Lannister, that she is not in Westeros yet, and besides, the lissome and supple material cradling her body is far more scant than any Westerosi raiment, letting the sea wind through her every pore.

They would be landing in the Kingdom most odd and foreign to the other six, so separate from the lands her family had ruled in, where they'd walked, where they'd lived.

She'd tried to confide in her Small Council a circle of people who Daenerys could bear honest stirrings of the heart. But that had gotten her nowhere. Both Yara Greyjoy and the eunuch Grey Worm, the Commander of her Queensguard, don't truly understand. It was a matter of upbringing; Yara claimed her true home was the sea, like any ironman's; that it didn't matter if her home in the Iron Islands was barred from her.

Grey Worm, she can hardly blame for being oblivious; he had no inkling of where he'd come from, his first memories of whips and blood, daggers and screaming mothers. Though Daenerys doesn't doubt he felt purpose serving her, Grey Worm has difficulty grasping the concept of home as a spread of land that one belonged to.

The story is the same with the rest of them; Varys, Master of Whisperers, gives her perfumed words, and she swallows them before she realizes his counsel is not suited to matters of the heart; Missandei, who filled the role of Daenerys' Master of Tongues, still views the world through black and white eyes. "You are the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Your Grace," the Naathi translator says. "If you want to go to King's Landing, every man on every ship in our fleet will get you there."

Tyrion decides, in misguided kindness, to explain to her why she is wrong to feel as she does.

"You don't like that we're landing in Dorne, Your Grace? The Kingdom that your brother chose his first wife from?" Tyrion had jested as they spoke belowdecks one night, his mouth agape in mock surprise. "Who have been waiting for an heir to Aerys' throne to return and drive my family into the sea? Who will follow you into the depths of all seven hells?"

"Aegon the Conqueror did not land in Dorne," she had replied. Her hand had brushed against her face, brushing a lock of platinum hair from her eyes, and her face had felt stonier than normal. Her jaw was tight. "If he had, King's Landing would be a great deal hotter. None but Rhaegar ever walked in Dorne. My people's dominion was north."

"Ahhhh," the dwarf drawled, waggling a drunk finger at her. "Your family. Not your people. Your people are north and south, east and west, from the Wall to the Broken Arm. When we get to Sunspear you will be surrounded by them. Trust me to know subjects from blood. The first, I let my brute of a nephew slaughter with impunity, and the second I sniped while he shat."

"You still haven't told me why you killed your father."

"I recall telling you we needed more wine than we had. This single skin is half of what we had in the Great Pyramid that afternoon. We have a crucial deficit, Your Grace; could we not trade in a few of these extra Dothraki for more?"

Daenerys smiles at him as he chuckles, but her heart still pangs in her chest, unsatisfied.

"Highgarden will be between us and King's Landing . . . and the Arbor within sailing distance once Dorne is fully in our grasp. I will live, Your Grace."

Daenerys had grinned at him sadly, hoping Tyrion didn't notice her staring out of the window over his shoulder. She wished terribly to have someone around her whose mind wasn't as expansive as Tyrion's or Varys', but enlightened enough about the ways of the world to give wise counsel. Grey Worm was single-minded; Missandei was obvious and Yara impervious.

She stands out on the prow of Balerion, the wind tearing at her as even under a now-black sky, she rushes towards home. But how long would it be? How many more weeks and weeks would it be before Daenerys saw that great black behemoth of a chair before her, where the last Valyrians had sat? How long until she could breathe, fall and let the Iron Throne catch her?

Something prods her in the back, and she turns to see a great winged serpent coiling itself upon a sturdy wooden cross. The deck sprouted the perch almost like a second mast, and even after weeks at sea she cannot believe that the dragons' great bulks don't implode any of the ships they land on.

One or two torches burn in sconces along the deck railing, and in the flickering light she can see the rich, gold-vanilla scales of Viserion, his green slitted eyes boiling in the darkness. Again his massive, four-foot-wide snout brushes the small of her back. He sniffs, and keens low in his throat. The breath smells of burnt wood, burnt meat, like smoke and a dinner hall. Daenerys turns to her surrogate child, her green eyes meeting his. There are times she regrets locking him and his brother Rhaegal under the Great Pyramid. She had let their brother Drogon go free, she rode him in battle. Sometimes she wishes there were three of her. Three mothers for three dragons, three Queens to satisfy all who needed one.

With unbelievably gentle motion that says nothing of his size, Viserion bumps his nose against his mother's hand. Daenerys runs it between his nostrils, over layers of scales as silky as milk, over spikes along his mandible, down the dragon's stocky muzzle.

Viserion's throat lowers, his eyes flickering onto Daenerys, until she hears spikes grate against wood. The question is pointed, more polite than Drogon but less suave than Rhaegal. A ride?

The rest of the ship sleeps, all except for a scattering of Unsullied crewmen making sure Balerion doesn't crash in the night. Daenerys clambers up Viserion's body, hauling herself onto his wing and shimmying along until she straddles him at the juncture of his neck and his torso. Ever attentive, all she has to do is whisper "Sōvegon" and he obeys. The sails are flattened against their masts as Viserion's golden wings carry him into the air. He ascends high above the Targaryen fleet in a matter of moments, all of her ships a gathering of candles against a black sheet. Somewhere out her in the night are Drogon and Rhaegal . . .

But even up here she couldn't find a spell to throw her forward in time, further towards the Iron Throne. There was one man who might've seen what she could. He chould've stripped her down to her basest emotions. After all, he'd been there when she had no dragons or Unsullied, no ships or soldiers, only a Khal who loved her and three beautiful eggs.

And he was most likely insane, or dead.

Could even dragons for sons replace an Andal?


	2. Beric I

BERIC

He hadn't been there in decades, and what he remembered of it had been whittled away by journey after journey into the dark beyond. Over the years, his past of lordship and tourneys had been blotted out by the storm gathering in the back of his mind; ever present, ever looming, a black cloud beyond a shining white battlement. For years, now, it had been the Goliath to he and his men; the insurmountable object. Faced with that, and his memories being torn from him, Beric tended to forget the little things.

But as his horse crests a sloping hill at the head of the Brotherhood's procession, delivered onto a breadth of beauty stained with gold and crimson flowers as far as the eye can see, friendly trees and inviting ponds, Beric remembers why they call it the Reach. It's like he can stretch his arms out to the horizon and grip all the finery in the world.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," moans a raspy, thick voice from behind him. Beric's lips curl into an exasperated smile. The sun glitters above them, turning everyone's armor and weapons into slivers and curves of light. A cornucopia of splendor is laid out before the Brotherhood, and all that Sandor Clegane can do is whine.

"We've been on the move since the Riverlands, and not a single inn from there to Ashford has had one fucking chicken."

"There'll be food in Sunspear, Clegane," Beric answers, turning his head to look at Clegane with his one good eye. The Hound is clad in a knight's chainmail and pauldrons again, and his beard and stringy locks of hair have grown longer and fuller. Beric almost doesn't recognize the foul-mouthed man, at least not compared to their meetings in the past; only the melted skin on the right side of his face that blanketed his obliterated brow gives it away; that and his standoffishness towards almost anyone who spoke to him. A Hound indeed.

"Oh, fuck that. I'd rather not choke to death on a saucer's full of spices, thanks."

Hooves clop up from behind the two, and Thoros of Myr brings his horse into a slow trot next to Clegane's. "What, Dornish food too hot for you, dog?" He grins at his and Beric's grim companion, what few teeth the drunkard had left stark against his scarred face. "Thought you'd gotten over that problem with the heat, what with all our burning weapons, 'n such." Thoros' beard had become too sweltering for him in the southern heat, and he'd singed it off with his wild, flaming blade. Beric hasn't seen his friend clean-shaven before.

"Eat shit, baldy. You look like a little girl with that dumb fucking topknot and no beard."

"I hear you take a liking to them, Clegane. Run them up and down Westeros to their families. Were you trying to run an orphanage? You should have stayed in King's Landing for that."

"It'd make more sense for us to go there than Dorne. Y'said cold winds, Beric," Clegane growls.

"Aye, that I did."

"Cold winds. Like they have in the North."

"No, I suppose Dorne doesn't have many of those."

"Then why the fuck are we here?"

Beric's smile fell, and as always when the darkness beyond the Wall came up, the rest of the contents of his mind were squashed into the background. He sighs, and he feels as though he's lived a full life for each of his deaths, and is older than old. He jabs a thumb behind himself, Clegane, and Thoros, behind the Brotherhoods procession, behind Reach and Crownland and Riverland, behind a wall of ice, where one rotting horse trotted slowly.

"We're here because the Lord of Light R'hllor has willed it, Clegane," he said. "There are darker things in this world than Cersei Lannister or your brother. There aren't many who are preparing for the war to come. The real war. We're some of those who believe. Another was just crowned King In The North."

"Which is precisely my point," Clegane shoots back. "Why aren't we riding North?"

Thoros unslings a wineskin from his shoulder and uncaps it, gulping down a swig of honeyed wine.

"Look behind us," he splutters as red liquid rolls down his naked chin. "A few hundred swords alone won't do the living any good against the Night King. The dead don't fear the bite of steel. Westeros needs fire, and lots of it."

Clegane groans, snatching the skin from Thoros and downing the whole thing in three long, noisy drafts. "I've seen enough fucking fire for my day, Beric. Just my luck I get stuck with three hundred men who think every crackle is some fart from god. And you." He turned in his saddle to look Thoros down, dwarfing the smaller man and, Beric was sure, affixing him with that deadly black-eyed stare, where Clegane's pupil and iris were one, a single threatening orb.

"I haven't learned much in my day," he rasped. "But I know one thing for damn sure, Thoros. The dead fear nothing. Nothing at all, because they're dead. They're bags of rotten meat in the ground and could give two shits what the living do."

"You're right," Beric interjects with geniality. "They fear nothing. I know you only fear one thing, Clegane. But when the sky is black for years, the snows bury our castles, and the dead are all that still walk, will you be so afraid of fire then?"

Clegane is silent then, his eyes on the road and the sky interchangeably, likely pondering the grim weight of Beric's words. Beric puts a hand on the shoulder of his armor, and the Hound stabs at him with that dark stare again, but he ignores it.

"The threat is real, Clegane," Beric says. "And we need more than three hundred men to give to Jon Snow when the time comes."

"What the fuck else we got?"

"A horde of Dothraki, eight thousand Unsullied, legions of ironmen and Tyrell and Martell vassals, and three dragons."


	3. Jon I

JON

Winterfell's Great Hall was quiet, but for the sounds of mouths biting into white bread, soft cheese and diced carrots. Wine was housed in a goblet by Jon's side, but it lay untouched and still, its inky depths contrasting against the hard grey light that fell from the cloud-covered morning sky outside. He sat at the high table in the center, at the most honored and middle seat of the dais where most honored men had sat for generations. Here, Eddard Stark had sat, Rickard before him, Robb after him. Jon found it odd that he had no reason whether he was a bastard anymore. Clearly, the Lords of the North had left it from their minds when they named him their King. The crown was heavy on his brow, his head unused to the weight. A new burden to be borne where that of his parentage had been removed.

He squeezed the bridge of his nose and sighed, finally taking a swig of the cheap wine set in front of him. His sleep was as it had been for years, each and every night; haunted and fleeting. The previous night's slumber had been no different, and such an early time of day to wake for a meeting of the Lords of the North certainly hadn't helped. The days were getting darker and shorter, the sky paler and paler. Jon found himself preparing the North for war, ratifying harvest quotas, and organizing dragonglass mining operations with locations provided by his Maester to be, Samwell Tarly, all in darkness. He woke in darkness, he slept in the light. The natural tempo of Jon's sleep was out of tandem with the day and the night. The Stark words became heavier and heavier with import as the days wore on : Winter Is Coming.

And he knew another King came with it.

Jon pulled his cloak of bear and wolf-skins closer aboud him, the morning chill turning his direwolf gorget into a noose of ice about his neck and collarbones. The hot springs that supposedly heated Winterfell from below the ground had decided to ignore him this morning, and instead concentrate all the warmth they had to offer in Sansa. His sister sat, straight-backed and dignified, in her lesser throne as she nibbled away at bread and cheese like a caterpillar through a leaf. Her hair is divided into a hundred knots of fire down her back, with individual locks cascading over the grey-black wolf pelts that her shoulders bare. The two pauldrons are bound together with a gleaming silver chain on her breast. Under her winter coverings she wears a roughspun grey dress, fittings and sewing adjustments pulling the fabric tight to her body.

"Why aren't they here yet?" Sansa says with derision in her voice between bites. She'd resented most of the Northern Lords since they had failed to rally around her and Jon to retake Winterfell from Ramsay Bolton. Jon worried about her, truly. There was a coldness in Sansa, a steely mercilessness that she hadn't had when she'd left for King's Landing with their father all of those years ago. Jon had despised Ramsay as much as any man with a shred of honor, but he'd been shocked when Lord Cley Cerwyn of Castle Cerwyn had discovered an eviscerated corpse tied to a chair in the dungeons, with hungry dogs sniffing about chewed bits of meat on the ground.

Sansa was still, in many ways, the girl he remembered. But in other ways she had become a fitting successor for Cersei Lannister. Jon just hopes she knows how slippery the path is. Jon almost feels like laughing. With Ghost lounging at his feet and the crown on his head, some might call him the successor to Robb Stark. He just hopes the Night King isn't invited to his wedding.

"They won't miss it," Jon replies. "They're all eager to see who I honor with lands and titles since I accepted their crown."

"You say that like that's all they care about," she answers, now gulping down her own wine. "This is where we lay out the plans that decide what happens to the North. Maybe Westeros."

"I know men, Sansa. I've seen them be selfish when-"

"No, you know dead men and giants. I spent most of my girlhood in the care of the woman who maneuvered her way onto the Iron Throne. I know men and I know selfishness."

"I won't do it," Jon hums, putting his brown in one hand and cracking a carrot between his teeth. The split of the orange flesh is like a thunderclap in the room with no fresh bodies of Lords to muffle it. Another, he slides under the table into Ghost's wet gums. "They have a hard enough time with the Night King marching on the south. The Umbers hate wildlings, and they hate me for letting them into the North. Most of the other Houses hate the Umbers and the Karstarks for fighting for Ramsey. There're hardliners in the wildling ranks that want to cut the throats of every northman we have. To say nothing of the south, Sansa. The last time a southern tradition was forced on them, they marched to King's Landing thirty thousand strong and broke at the Twins. And that was with a single goal shared between them. Half of them want to kill the other half. Half want to go home and shore up their foodstuffs for winter, and half of them want to run down south again."  
Sansa sighs, and grins darkly as though she's trying to ignore a blob of acid on her tongue. The bitter look on her face softens Jon's heart. She's only trying to help.

She drinks a good portion of her wine, and Jon start to feel his guts warm as the liquid takes it effects. He'd never taken to drink as much as some men he knew, but in these blackening days it sometimes seemed to be the only thing that could drive away the cold.

"You need a small council, Jon," she said. "You've led men in battle, and you've been a Lord Commander. But you've never held a crown, never been a King. I've seen what that can do to people who aren't ready for it. You need loyal advisers who will tell you when you're wrong. Robb didn't heed warnings once and Walder Frey butchered him for it."

"If I raise one Lord above another, the others will feel slighted," he protested. "I can't have them marching home with the dead so close. We need all our strength when the time comes."

"Then forbid them to leave. You're the King In The North."

"They'll unmake me."

"The people love you, Jon. They know that you've fought beyond the Wall. I'd be hard-pressed to find a man we've gathered, no matter who he's sworn to, who doesn't think you're Father come again."

Jon smiled at her, the cold and the prospect of likely death far from his mind. Rickard and Eddard and Robb and the rest were gone, Rickon and Bran and Arya dead, but Sansa was here. Jon laid a hand on hers.

"You honor me, sister," he breathed.

The latch on the doors of the Great Hall clacked open, and the hinges groaned as the great wooden door swung against the walls. The meeting had begun.

Sansa smirked back at him, any hint of animosity gone, her eyes on the door.

"More honor yet to come, brother," she replied.

The entrance of the Lords of the North to the hall was no grand affair. In fact, the horns and shouts of revelry from many a song were replaced by hoarse yawns, grumbles, and the occasional cough. The cold and early hour were affecting more than just Jon.

First came Jon's most loyal vassal, Lady Lyanna Mormont of Bear Island. Scantly thirteen, she never ceased to surprise Jon as she commanded the respect of all of the Mormont household guard who entered behind her. Her eyes were dark, her mouth a perpetual frown. She was the Old Bear's niece indeed. She took her place on the right side of the room, at a dark, long table normally pulled to the center of the room for feasting.

Second came a trio; Lord Wyman Manderly of White Harbor, as tall as he was fat, walked alongside Lord Robett Glover of Deepwood Motte, whose balding head Manderly played opposite to with his long mane of white hair. Glover was squat where Manderly was long, sullen where Manderly was jovial, and fatigued where Manderly was full of life. Like Lyanna, Glover wore an unbroken frown upon his face, but when his eyes met with Jon's he nodded to his King reverently. Household guards of both Lords mingled together and stood at the doors as they sat beside Lyanna Mormont.

The end of the trio came with a hulk of a man close behind Lords Manderly and Glover, red beard adding a great splash of color to a room full of blacks and greys and whites. Tormund Giantsbane and the wildlings who made him their de-facto leader had been killing northmen for generations, and northmen had been killing wildlings for generations. Jon thought it was remarkable how far things had come, now that Tormund only jested with the northmen, and they only scowled back at the utterly undeterred wildling. He might have been odd to them, but Jon had seen the home of the Free Folk, their philosophy and their living. He had few friends that were closer to him than Tormund.

Following the Free Folk came thin and haggard Lord Cley Cerwyn, and after him Lady Alys Karstark, not much older than Lyanna and an eighth as fierce. Part of her meekness might just have been her personality, and part of it might have been to avoid angering the King In The North whose forces her bannermen had battled not long ago.

The youngest of them all was Lord Ned Umber of Last Hearth, a brown-haired, wide-faced youth who was so short his sword hilt went past his belly button as it lay in its scabbard. He plodded into the hall with half a dozen of his household guards, looking less like their Lord and perhaps one of their uncertain children as he looked to and fro about the room. Lady Berena Tallhart of Torrhen's Square chided the boy forward. With no son of her own by her side, Lady Berena seemed to have taking a liking to Ned. Jon had too. The boy was pitifully young, but he was as good hearted as his grandfather Greatjon before him, and not nearly as thick-skulled.

The next of the minor Lords to arrive was Yohn Royce, the wide and powerful Lord of Runestone and commander of the Knights of the Vale. Though not a Northern Lord, Yohn Royce was a proven tactician and gave orders to the strongest mounted force their alliance had to fight against the dead. Jon saw fate's hand as well in Royce's allegiance. His father had taken counsel from an older, wiser Lord from the Vale in Jon Arryn. Bronze Yohn's presence among Jon's vassals was invaluable.

And last, by far the most problematic, Lord Petyr Baelish of the Vale strode in, his beard cropped immaculately, his cloak pinned together with a mockingbird wrought in silver. He wore a look of utter innocuousness on his face as he sat beside Bronze Yohn, both of their retinues of Vale knights mixing together. Jon didn't like the man, nor did he trust him, but he had no crimes to bring Littlefinger to justice for yet. The way Sansa's eyes narrowed as soon as Baelish entered the room ignited a feeling in Jon that the rattish man hid some dark secrets indeed.

Last and without guards came Ser Davos Seaworth, Jon's right hand man, and Brienne of Tarth, Sansa's right hand woman. Jon held Davos and his service in high esteem, and had since the man had abandoned his own flagging King Stannis to guard Jon's body when he'd been killed. He tried to put his time away from the land of the living out of his mind.

Brienne, Jon didn't know well. He'd met few knights in his time, but those that stood out clearest in his mind were Sandor Clegane and Jaime Lannister. Brienne was twice as honorable as the two of them put together, and it was said she had bested the Hound in combat before. Among many squabbling Lords, it was good to have someone near him who had neither want or vocabulary for word games.

Davos goes right, Brienne left. The female warrior shadows Sansa, standing at her side with a hand on her sword hilt. Davos pulls out the chair next to Jon and sits near silently, courtesies of a highborn man who had been lowborn on show like a shamefully sewn tourney banner. He hadn't finished breaking his fast before the meeting had been called. Fermented crab was between his teeth again before Jon began to speak. He just hopes Davos has kept it from spoiling since the Wall, and that the added side effects had been removed.

Jon reclined in his chair.

"My Lords," he begins, all eyes suddenly on him. The crown feels ten stone heavier. "I have accepted your crown, I've accepted dominion over the North, but I can't rule it on my own. Six hundred outcasts and criminals are different than thousands of smallfolk, soldiers and Giants. This is why I have decided to name some of those among you my Small Council."

Immediately, Lord Robett Glover rose.

"Forgive me, Your Grace," Glover said with a voice like gravel on a carriage's wheels. "But we are our own Kingdom now. We are the last bastion of the ways of the First Men. Are we to surrender more of ourselves to the Andals? No, says I. Let our King In The North hear counsel from whoever knows his troubles, not one man to know them all. I will not submit to a ruling body other than that which I chose to follow, nor will I bow to it should you stock it with Houses whose Lords died at war with House Stark."

"At least they fought, Lord Glover," Sansa interrupted. "Whatever their allegiance. I do not recall seeing a mailed fist fly anywhere in the Battle of The Bastards."

Before Lord Glover or Jon could reply, Bronze Yohn also stood up, his eldritch breastplate shiny in the stifling grey light.

"My Lady, I beg your pardon, but I am of a mind with Lord Glover. Why should I and the Lord of the Vale bow before the word of wildlings, should His Grace name one to his council?"

"Because he's our King," Tormund Giantsbane said, standing amongst his fellow Free Folk. "If you didn't want him to order you about, why the fuck give him a crown?" Lord Cerwyn turned in his seat to face Tormund.

"Jon Snow is the one who fought for the North when no one else would, when the night was darkest. Half of us didn't join 'im, and he freed Winterfell anyway. He'll lead us through the darker nights still to come. It's survival as much as loyalty, wildling."

"Aye," Tormund agreed, looking particularly thoughtful as he shrugged his shoulders and tapped his red chin. "To that I say that Jon Snow had the help of a big fucking Wall between him and the darker nights to come. Me and mine have fought them our whole lives and beyond. We know the dead better than any group here." Tormund's eyes left various faces in the crowd and landed directly on Jon.

"If the White Wolf wants to be advised," he continued. "The Free Folk will advise. Him and all of you southerners." Before he sat down, the wild-bearded man pointed to one of Winterfell's glass windows.

A massive, puggish face stared through the glass at the assembled Lords, partially concealed by odd billowy thickets of black hair. It grinned, smiling with teeth as wide as swords, and then waved a massive horny hand before turning away from the window.

"We also have Giants," Tormund finished, coughing and sitting down.

Everyone else had sat as well.

"I understand your concerns, Lords Glove and Royce," Jon resumed. "But I will not abide by them. I would rather see this country live than keep its heritage intact, and I cannot protect it without your support and your guidance. What is coming for us doesn't care what traditions a people follows, what faith a man holds." There were murmurs among the men and women, and general nods. Lyanna Mormont's hand on her axe tightened.

"You know it, and I do too. Wyman Manderly, step forward."

Abruptly aware of all eyes turning to him, Lord Wyman jiggled from his seat and knelt, sword drawn.

"Your Grace," he said. Jon bid him to rise as he slid his blade back into its scabbard.

"White Harbor has long been the land with the North's greatest incomes, and the Manderlys have managed it and made it grow still greater. I name you Master of Coin."

Lord Manderly's eyes widened and his mouth curled into a pleasant smile. Jon nodded in return, fatigue and trademark Stark grimness keeping a grin from his face.

"You will be working closely alongside Ser Davos Seaworth, Lord Wyman," he continued. "He will be my Master of Ships, and White Harbor is our main seaport."

Lord Manderly's face dropped significantly at that, and Jon's would have as well if it was not already a wintery mask. He'd known this would happen. Some proud Lord or another would writhe with indignant rage at being paired with a criminal and a servant of a child-burner, former or otherwise.

Davos contrasted his new partner completely. He strode around the high table, prominent teeth showing in a large smile and bowed so deep his necklace bag of finger bones brushed the floor. Jon had to crack a smile then. Davos answered his appointment with a thick, southern "Thank you, Your Grace, I will be of service" and then Lord Manderly stuttered out the same with less accent and more sweat.

The rest of the appointments went well; Master of Laws went to Lyanna Mormont, Masters of War to Yohn Royce and Tormund (commanding the armies of the Vale and wildlings, respectively), even Master of Whisperers ceded to Lord Baelish and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard to Brienne of Tarth surprised Jon; neither appointment drew shouts of "madness" and drawn longswords. His second great shock came when Lady Brienne accepted the position without a fight. She barely knew him, and had sworn herself to the long-slain Catelyn Stark, who'd been less than amicable to her husband's bastard son. Brienne had only recently returned to the North to find Jon Snow as King In The North, a man she had never met and never intended to follow. Yet here she was, swearing fealty to him.

Last was the appointment he was looking forward to the most. The tension in the chamber had ebbed out greatly as various Lords were clapped on the back for the great honor they had received. All the men and women were loosening up. Tiredness and dread of the foe beyond the Wall seemed to melt away, and Jon felt the hot springs below Winterfell pulse life into him as he raises a silencing hand to the crowd, smiling.

"Sansa Stark," he says to both his sister and the whole room. "Step forward."

Sansa's eyes bug out for a moment, and she downs the last few drops of her wine just to steady her feet as she treads around the high table and curtsies before her brother.

"Your Grace," she inclines her head, but Jon waves away the motion, still smiling at her.

"It was you who came to Castle Black with Lady Brienne and brought me to Winterfell. It was you who recruited many men here to fight in the Battle of the Bastards and restore your house to the rulers of the North. And, when all hope was lost, you brought us home with the Knights of the Vale."

"Jon . . ." she breathed, her cheeks dappled a crimson color that could not have been from windburn.

"I name you Hand of the King."

One of Sansa's hands goes to her mouth, though the tears freeze in her eyes and stay there. The room is silent for several long moments. Then, finally wearing a proud grin, Lord Glover rises again from his seat.

"Not even! Hail Sansa Stark, Hand of Winter!" He growls in his rasping voice like a direwolf. A few others stand, first Tormund, then Lady Hornwood, Lord's Cerwyn and Umber, and then the whole room explodes in a roar, Northmen thundering and hooting and cheering the last trueborn heir to Winterfell. Wildlings raise horns, Vale knights shout her name, and every Westerosi Northman draw their swords against the sky.

Jon's voice joins the hail, and for a moment he, too, can slip into a horde of other presences, and escape that crown that feels just a little lighter.


	4. Jaime I

JAIME

All of the golden lions in the world could surround him, and the bitter taste in his mouth wouldn't go away. It's like he can see clearly for the first time. He'd felt that clarity before, in isolated patches; he'd seen Tyrion's innocence of their mother's death, he'd leapt to Brienne's defense in the Riverlands more than once, he'd offered mercy to Brynden Tully not long ago. And, enshrined in the memories of Westeros forever, he'd killed Aerys Targaryen. Now his new vision was too much, screaming at him, drowning out even his thoughts.

This is wrong.

There'd been a selfish film over Jaime's eyes for a long time, and the last shred of it had fallen away in the rubble of the Sept of Baelor.

Now, standing in the darkened throne room, his golden armor odd amongst the jet black plate of Cersei's Queensguard, he can see everything clearly. Jaime can see King's Landing, the world of the Lannisters, for what it was; a pigshit city full of lust and evil and scarcity, where common people complained and the highborn slaughtered them for tiny slights.

He can see the Kingsguard for what it was. A rotten tree kept the ruler of Westeros from harm. All it gave was rotten apples who beat little girls and rode down stable boys. A fresh peach every generation or so was born, but was the minority. For every Barristan Selmy or Arthur Dayne, there were twenty Meryn Trants and fifty Boros Blounts.

And he can see what Cersei had done; with no excuses, no justifications leaping forth as Jaime himself had upon Alton Lannister. Nothing could color the deed anything other than black, black as Ser Gregor's armor, black as Qyburn's eyes, black as Cersei's heart. She'd brought evil to King's Landing, just as Aerys Targaryen had. Did the death tolls in the destruction of the Sept exceed those of the Wildfire Plot? Jaime wonders and says yes. But, one would have obliterated the city, and the other had claimed his last son.

He hadn't had the belief to look upon it at first. The body on the table in the throne room that day couldn't have been Tommen's; the boy would have been incinerated in the Sept by his mother's wildfire. But Tommen had been in the Red Keep. As Jaime's eyes rove over his son's broken face, white skin flecked with blood, bone stabbing through his flesh and his bent crown embedded in his skull . . .

He can't help but wonder if this is what Bran Stark would have looked like if the tower had been a little bit higher when Jaime pushed him out.

"Ser Jaime," Cersei calls from upon the Iron Throne. Even her tone is a deception, queenly and sweet, when she was vicious inside. More a lion than their father. "What should be done about this upstart from across the sea?"

"Forgive me, Your Grace," he murmurs, suddenly aware of the eyes of the other Queensguard on him. Even Ser Gregor's blood-red pupils bored into him, disfigured and evil, though Qyburn was nowhere to be found. Odd for the Hand of the Queen to be absent from court. "I was lost in thought."

"No doubt already planning our attack," Cersei said, flashing the assembled highborn a regal smile. "Where was the Dragon Queen's fleet spotted last?"

The commoner from the Stormlands who stood meekly before the throne kept talking. All Jaime could think about was Dragon Queen. Little birds flew in the east as well as the west, bringing back seeds of all kinds, but even the largest bird paled in the shadow of a dragon. Spies sent across the Narrow Sea came back with grim tales. Daenerys Targaryen ruled Meereen with a strong hand, had tamed the Dothraki and set them against her enemies, with eight thousand Unsullied infantry at her back. The warrior-eunuchs were a pitifully small host, but Aegon the Conqueror had landed in Westeros with proportionate numbers.

And with three dragons, Daenerys seemed her ancestor risen from the grave, bearing down on the Seven Kingdoms with two already pledged to her. The Reach and Dorne had picked up where the Riverlands and the North had left off, taking up arms against Lannister forces wherever they met them.

Riverlands in shambles, North and Vale in rebellion, Reach and Dorne in revolt, rumors of rebellion gathering in the Stormlands . . .

The noose was tightening around House Lannister, as it had been for nearly a decade now. Jaime could practically smell it. A reckoning was coming.

"Some o' us," the man continued, Jaime's attentions restored to him. "Remember th' good King Robert. Some o' us remember 'im when he was Lord a' Storm's End, Stranger rest his soul. We remember who was merciful to the Stormlands, what when two usurpers tried to take King Robert's throne from is' sons.

"We know where our loyalties are, Your Grace. Not with some spawn a' the Mad King."

"You honor me," Cersei inclined her head as a gesture of gratitude. Jaime almost chuckles. He remembered a time when she would be on edge just at the mention of Robert Baratheon's name. Jaime, too, had hated Robert. He'd despised Robert's excess and crudeness, and hated the way Robert had brutalized and tossed Cersei aside for his favorite whore of the day. Now she had to suck up to the people who still idolized the fat drunk for his destruction of the Targaryens. Jaime, as a silent sentinel guarding the Queen, was not so unfortunate.

"And not with you, neither," the man said, raising his face to the Queen and her assemblage of Queensguard. His eyes were pale, his face scarred and his hair long and dirty. He had a haunted visage, of a man who had seen death and torture, horrors enough for the rest of humanity put together. Cersei's face falls. Jaime can see exactly what's about to happen.

"Cause we remember Robert, and who killed 'im! The Seven curse you and your bastard line! Hail Gendry Rivers, STORM KING!"

A dirk flies from the man's belt seemingly of its own accord, as if pulled by some invisible string, and like a ghost he billows across the room towards Cersei. She screams, and so do the rest of the petty nobles gathered, rushing from the throne room in a tide of perfumed flesh and costly cloth. Weapon in hand, the man glides between nobles as if they aren't there at all. The Queensguard rush him, but he ducks between them dodging through their ranks like a trout through the hands of a starving fisherman, throwing himself between Boros Blount and Arys Oakheart, past the swipe of Preston Greenfield's sword with an almost animalistic, religious fervor. His dirk was raised high above his head, the point gleaming, as he advanced on the Iron Throne. Jaime himself drew his sword in his left hand, and before he realizes it he bounds between his sister and the Stormlander madman.

He got in one swipe of Widow's Wail, and missed.

The Valyrian steel blade bit into the stone stairs up to the throne and lodged deep into the masonry, refusing to come back out. Jaime puts heel to crossguard and heaves, but the blade refuses to budge. He's unable to try again as the man kicks him savagely in the hip and rams him. Jaime feels a bone shift in the man's shoulder, but he himself is thrown to the floor with no right hand to catch his fall.

His head turns upon the stone floor, disoriented, just in time to see Cersei backed against the Iron Throne, her killer standing over her. A wall to her back, dirk to her front, and swords flaring from the throne on all sides. She had nowhere to go.

"For the Stormlan-" he roars, until he is abruptly cut short by two massive hands closing about the crown of his head. Cersei's screams are replacing by a single, breathless gasp.

As silent as snowfall, Gregor Clegane calmly pulls the would-be Queenslayer's head from his shoulders.

The corpse drops its dirk, and its arms collapse. Legs fall away underneath it and it crumples to the floor, blood squirting out of the ruined veins where its head was a few moments before. Jaime rises from the ground, his veins on fire with adrenaline and his eyes locking on Cersei.

Tears flow freshly, and she slumps in the Iron Throne. Her eyes pass over Jaime like he isn't even there, and instead land on Ser Gregor. The mute Clegane knight stands before the throne, soundless as ever, holding the still leaking head out before his Queen.

Those wounded eyes that had fastened onto Cersei in a frenzy were closed now. All the features were relaxed now, zeal and death incompatible.

Cersei's whole face twists now that the danger is removed. Her eyebrows curl, the tears in her eyes seem to boil, and her teeth grit against each other as she reasserts herself on the Throne. Jaime remembered that look well, from nearly forty years spent with his sister. Robert had prompted that look from her, and Robb Stark. Stannis and Renly Baratheon, Margaery Tyrell, and most of all Tyrion; there were few who weren't included in Cersei's silent prayers for tragedy.

Most of them had been answered now, at any rate. Jaime pities whoever had sent the man. They were about to have a pride of lions upon them.

"You know what to do with it, Ser Gregor," she growled. With that, the giant turned and strode from the throne room, head in hand.

Cersei rose from the throne, clasping her hands together and taking back a semblance of composure, though with misty eyes and just enough of a tremor in her voice to convince the crowd she was shaken with terror and not rage. That same smile was turned to those Lords who remained, the one that hid everything Jaime knew lurked in Cersei's heart; the one he wanted to hold in his hands again, before they'd made everything go so wrong.

"Court is adjourned, my Lords and Ladies," she announced. "I thank you for your time. I fear the attempt on my life has made me feel rather sick. We will resume on the morrow."

Dozens of bows and "Your Grace"s sweep over the room, and the final few who remained exited the Great Hall more than quickly. Cersei gestured for a few servants to carry away the slain man's body, and to wipe the blood away from the smooth stone steps. Queensguard falling in behind her, Cersei strides through the passageway behind the Iron Throne, heading for the royal apartments in Maegor's Holdfast.

No calling for him.

No taking him by the hand, leading him to her bed.

She didn't even look at him.

Then Jaime was alone in the Great Hall, a one-handed, lovesick fool with a sword stuck in the floor.

It took an hour of trying for Jaime to realize that Widow's Wail was not coming out of the floor, at least not by the strength of just one hand. It was only when Ser Gregor returned from the Traitor's Walk, absent of his severed head but not the blood it had squirted, that Jaime found hands strong enough to lift the ancient blade from the stone. Looking at him with grotesque, folded eyes, Gregor offered Widow's Wail to him handle first and then soundlessly walked from the room again.

"You were too slow," Cersei hisses when he finally makes his way to her chambers in Maegor's Holdfast and finds her sitting upon her bed. The tears are gone, replaced by an angry sneer that almost makes Jaime fear she'll' sink her teeth into him. Her diadem is set aside upon the richly embroidered sheets, and the metal finery that graced her shoulders so often in the Great Hall had been removed. "One unarmored peasant with a dagger throws you to the ground? I'm surprised I'm still alive. If my Queensguard can't fight, my armies will be bowled over by smallfolk with plows and butter-knives!"

"I was trying to protect you," Jaime retorts. "And if you don't make the smart choices, now, it won't matter how well your armies can fight. We'll be as good as dead."

"Is that a threat?" Cersei stands now, approaching him and looking him right in the eye with incredulity dyeing her face.

"It's a dose of fucking reality, Cersei," he answers, stepping up to his sister as well. "Have you left this city at all in the last few years? Have you seen what's left of Westeros after the war you let our son start?"

"Don't you dare," she growls. "I warned Joffrey about killing Ned Stark up until the moment his head fell down the steps of the Sept. Someone had to rein him in while you were galavanting around the Riverlands."

"While we're talking about the Riverlands, do you have any idea how many more men Walder Frey would need to adequately control them? How many soldiers are still loyal to the Tullys, even with the Blackfish dead? What about Highgarden? How many thousands of Tyrell bannermen will Lady Olenna march to Casterly Rock? Or worse, here!"

"Casterly Rock has never fallen," Cersei declared.

"When the army was still as strong as Father made it," Jaime scoffed. "We've not got the endless mighty hosts we used to. Who does? The Vale. The Reach. Dorne. The Aryyns have declared for this King In The North. You know who the Reach and Dorne swore fealty to."

"Qyburn has as many little birds as Varys did," she sneers. "Of course I know."

"And you know Tyrion is her Hand," Jaime breathed, softer this time. "Who was Hand here in King's Landing for years. He knows everything we can throw at her." Jaime closes the last few feet between them, pulling her to him. "Look at me."

Her eyes dart away from his, but Jaime grips her chin firmly between his pointer finger and thumb, the ones still made of flesh. Green finds green in the space between them.

"I know what you're going to do," he whispers. "I know that you'll fight to the bitter end, whether she rolls up to the gates of the city, or Ned Stark's bastard, or Olenna Tyrell, or the goddamn White Walkers come again. You'll fight- we'll fight. And we'll die." He smiles down at her, moving his good hand down to the swell of her hips. "This Throne is poison, Cersei. This city- it took our children. I don't want it to take you from me or me from you.

"They're coming," he continues. All of them. They're bearing down on us, can't you see it? We still have time, sister. We can still run."

She looks at him, silent and blank, her face unreadable, for a long moment before she replies.

"If we're in such danger, it's because of you. You released Tyrion after he killed our son, and to show his thanks he killed our father. You weren't here while I was locked in a cell for weeks. You weren't here to protect Tommen from that High Sparrow and the Tyrell whore when I couldn't."

Moving out of his grasp, Cersei strides towards the window of her chambers that looked out over King's Landing, the city she traded their son's life for. All pretense of intimacy disappears.

"You heard this man hail a 'Storm King'," she drones. "Our hosts in the Stormlands have been going dark for weeks, and now we know why. I've already sent word for our soldiers from Dragonstone to return, but Duskendale will raise the bulk of the men you'll take. I want you to take Storm's End, find this Gendry and we'll spike his head above the Traitor's Walk. Then raze the Stormlands from Bitterbridge to Mistwood."

"That's it, then?" Jaime says. "Run off and try to take Storm's End with less than a fourth of the men required? Go find another enemy when we're piteously low on allies?"

"If you would make an ally of the man who sends assassins after your Queen, your head might just go beside his," she replies, her eyes not leaving the cityscape below her, where rubble from the Sept had lain waste to the innocent, and Tommen's brains had been bashed from his skull.

"I am your Queen, Jaime Lannister," Cersei continues. "You will do as I command. And when you return . . ." she turned back to him then, and the smile on her face wiped away the angry grimace on Jaime's. This was the woman he remembered, with hate far from her heart. She comes back to him, striding with a Queen's grace she'd had long before the title, and puts her dainty hands on his face as she kisses him. Jaime hates himself all the more as he finds himself believing the promise behind it. His good hand pools against the small of her back and brings his sister closer to him, his stubble scratching her perfect, supple face.

"I will be here for you," she finishes when their lips disconnect. "Give me Storm's End, and I will give you sons. Give me Storm's End and I will give you my hand.

"Do this for me, sweet brother, and return to me King of Westeros."


	5. Daenerys II

DAENERYS

The map was stretched tight over the table, all candles, parchments, quills and inkpots removed to make room for it. In the sunlight streaming through the windows, the map looks like a skin of jewels, illuminated in brilliant prisms from Dorne to the Wall, everywhere between the Narrow and Sunset Seas wrought in unearthly finery and exquisite painting. Where her Hand had procured such a work of art, Daenerys didn't know, but it made the ache for home that much more agonizing, and the promise of the Iron Throne that much sweeter.

Those who would help her win it are laid out before her.

Tyrion sits on her left, Varys beside him. Flanking the table on her right side are her Essosi advisors Missandei, Grey Worm, and Qhono, her chosen khalakka of the Dothraki hordes that had followed her to Westeros. When she'd taken control of them half a world away in Vaes Dothrak, Qhono had been the only one with the credibility to step forward and represent his people. He led the fighting men in battle, and Daenerys led him in other ways, in silent moments and flickering candlelight. After she was dead, he would inherit leadership over the horselords who had chosen to follow her, and do what he would with them.

For now, he was hers.

On Varys' left were the two Greyjoys, Yara and Theon. Daenerys had met Yara many times; a Master of Ships needed to hold conversation with her Queen often when the whole of their armies was stationed aboard ships. But Daenerys had spoken only once to Theon before today, on the other side of the world in Meereen. She couldn't claim to know him, but she knew the look in his eyes. She'd seen it in Dothraki slaves from Lhazareen, in slaves in Yunkai and Astapor. Wherever he'd been, all the fierceness of the ironmen and outlawing of slavery in the world hadn't been able to keep Theon from being broken by someone; someone she had a feeling was worse than the Good or Wise Masters.

With this map in front of her, Daenerys is a god, more powerful than her dragons and more wise than Qartheen warlocks, rising above the clouds with a great continent at her feet. With a trace of her finger she can cross the thousand miles between Lannisport and Winterfell, from the Fingers to the Arbor. She's invincible, unimpeded by land, sea, or air. She could move her armies as easily as the wooden figurines they were represented by, speeding Dothraki and Dornish legions around the continent and back. The Iron Throne, her reason for seeing herself through tragedy and defeat, is but a dot on parchment.

Perhaps such a simulation will have to do, until she can plant her feet on her country's soil and take it truly. The stretching weeks they had been at sea weren't lost on anyone, her most of all.

Daenerys turned to her Westerosi advisors.

"You three know this country," she said, gesturing at the spread of depicted land before her. "Who rules where, and who do I need to be wary of?"

"I cannot speak to his allegiances, Your Grace," Yara replied. "Except that they're a mystery to everyone but him, but our uncle Euron commands most of the Iron Fleet, as we told you when we first met. He may not have dragons, but he's completely unpredictable, and the ironmen were made to fight at sea. Our people have destroyed larger fleets than ours before. If he finds us before we make it to Sunspear . . . many will die."

"But he was in Pyke, last you saw him," Tyrion interjected. "He'd have to sail down half of Westeros before he could strike at our fleets. By that time we'll be docked and we'll combine our might with that of the Dornish fleet."

"Aye," Yara said. " But stranger, worse circumstances have found our uncle before, and he's managed to come out on top and fuck whoever was fucking him every time. Last we saw him, he was planning to give Her Grace here his 'big cock'. It's likely he's caught wind of where we're headed and he's on his way here."

Daenerys blushed and scowled. She'd had cocks that would put any of these ironmen to shame. It didn't help that the only one of their number she'd ever met was reputed not to have a cock himself.

"How do the ironmen fight?" Daenerys asked.

"Hard, and mean. We ram ships and board them, clear them out, commandeer them if we can. It's all axes and swords and hammers. Bloody. Between us and the Unsullied . . . could go either way. If Euron's men come against the Dothraki, his men will win. Dothraki don't know how to fight at sea."

Qhono groaned, Balerion's lower decks swaying beneath his nonexistent sea legs.

"So there's little ranged combat to be found."

"Yes, Your Grace," Yara nodded.

"Good. Then all we need do is located him and my dragons will obliterate the fleet from the air."

"That would require ships with perches for the dragons to rest," Tyrion said. "We can't have Drogon, Viserion and Rhaegal search the wholes of both Seas looking for them."

Daenerys turned back to Yara. "Perhaps all we need to find ironmen are ironmen," she said thoughtfully. "Can you track him down given the time?"

"More than likely," the Master of Ships replied. "Though we won't be able to match his own fleet out there, not alone. He has four times the men Theon and I were able to convince to join us."

Daenerys smirked.

"Euron Greyjoy lives upon the water. He and his ships will burn upon it before I sit on the throne."

"Ah, but it needn't come to that, Your Grace," Varys cooed from across the table. "Euron Greyjoy has not yet declared for any of our enemies on the mainland. He is a great warrior and King of one of the seven Kingdoms which you plan to rule. His fleet is large, his men ruthless. Why burn a bridge immediately when one can be built that will hurt no one?"

"Because Euron's men are rapers and savages."

"What would you call the Dothraki?"

Qhono stood abruptly, his chair screeching across the floor. His eyes burned a deep amber, even as his face stood starkly pale and green. One of his powerful hands rested on the hilt of his arakh. Daenerys raised her hand to him, wishing she was close enough to touch his rippling arm and sooth him.

"Qhono," she said with a soft Dothraki accent, before continuing in his mother tongue. "It will not do to profane your Khaleesi's eyes with the sight of her friend's blood, would it?"

"He insults my people," Qhono retorted. "Insults me while he is a eunuch, not even half a man. He has no right."

"Sit, khalakka. Leave your arakh where it lies."

His hands tightened for a moment, but the commander of the Dothraki sat back down, weapon unsheathed.

"I will make no more allies of those who do evil in the world, Lord Varys," Daenerys said in the Common Tongue, with none of the tenderness she had shown Qhono. "The Dothraki will be tempered by my rule, not me by theirs. I am their Queen. I am not the Queen of the ironmen. Perhaps they would accept me, but not while Euron Greyjoy lives."

With Varys cowed, Daenerys looked to her Master of Ships once more. "Will his death trouble you, my Lady?"

"Not even, Your Grace," Yara growled. "Were it my choice, I'd send him to the Drowned God myself."

"And your brother?"

All eyes turned to Theon, who hadn't said a word or made eye contact with a human being since he'd sat down. Daenerys saw his eyes darting from the floor to her to the floor and back, and she noticed his chest rising and falling with hoarse, uneven breaths. Theon coughed once and shifted in his kraken-emblazoned cuirass.

"Hardly know the man, Y'Grace," he spoke softly. "Do what you will."

That was all Theon had to say.

"And what about the rest of them?" Daenerys spoke. "Who else's allegiance might I be able to count on?"

Tyrion cleared his throat. "At this point there are more wild cards than sure enemies, my Queen," he said, taking a sip of the wine before him. "We have a King In The North, a Lord of the Twins, and a Storm King who certainly have no love for my sister. The bastard of Ned Stark rules in the North, and they say the bastard of Robert Baratheon in the Stormlands."

Daenerys paused at that, quivering at the memory of her fear at just the mention of Robert Baratheon. The man who had laid her brother Rhaegar low, the man who had hunted her and her brother across an ocean and a continent. Fat and drunk as he was said to be, it was over Robert's knee that her family had been shattered.

"And we know that the man is Robert's seed? Truly?" Daenerys asked.

"Illegitimate, but yes, My Queen," Varys purred. "I and this bastard both resided in King's Landing before the War of The Five Kings began. Robert's first Hand went to visit the boy often, as did his second, and my little birds trailed them in all their business. The reports they returned to me said the boy was the spitting image of his father. From what they tell me now, he has rallied the Storm Lords and retaken his father's castle at Storm's End. He's destroyed most if not all of the Lannister hosts within the Stormlands and plans to take King's Landing itself."

"So he means to take my throne from me," Daenerys interrupted.

Varys leaned back in his chair and folded his plump hands. "The throne isn't his objective, Your Grace. Cersei Lannister killed his father, and had dozens of his fellow Baratheon bastards slaughtered. No doubt he wants revenge, and justice for his House."

"For the sake of his men, I hope that's all he wants."

I can't attest to the Baratheon boy," Tyrion offered. "But the King In The North I can. I have met Jon Snow before, Your Grace. Granted it was some time ago, but he's a good man. A little touched with Northern superstition, but the man who raised him was honorable right up to the moment his head came loose from his shoulders. Not only that, but only recently did he liberate the North from the rule of House Bolton, and they carry flayed men on more than just their banners. He's done similar work to yours in Slaver's Bay."

"And how am I supposed to treat with him," Daenerys began. "When I have thousands of hostile forces between me and-" her eyes glazed over the map of her country. "Winterfell?"

"They're hostile to him, too," her Hand answered. "Send ravens. Sail for White Harbor if you must. If Jon Snow comes into the fold, you will rule both ends of Westeros, and have that much more might to bring against Cersei."

She considered it for a long moment. Daenerys had read about the Northerners, their Kings of Winter and their stubborn, unflagging tempers. Should she go to this Jon Snow and prove unworthy of the King's loyalties, she may throw a powerful ally right into the Lannister camp.

But still. She would rule from Dorne to the Wall, and only have to conquer all of the riches that lay in the middle.

Grey Worm cleared his throat, his straight back and resting scowl never vanishing.

"My Queen," he says in his deep, sonorous lilt. "Forgive me, but this is the way. You put shields and spears in the North-" a finger on the Neck, "and in the South," a finger on the Dornish Marches. "North travels South, South travels North. The enemy has nowhere to go but the sea. We will be waiting there too, if need be."

"And this . . . Lord of the Twins?"

Varys gave Tyrion a pointed stare. "I told you you shouldn't have mentioned him," the eunuch warned.

"I know it's on the edge of sanity, but we need all the help we can get," the dwarf replied.

"What do you mean?" Daenerys questioned of them both.

Both of her more conniving advisors gave her sideways glances.

"Walder Frey," they said in unison. Tyrion, having had a great deal more wine than Varys, spoke much faster than his companion did.

"He's a cunning snake of a River Lord who maneuvered his way into ruling the Riverlands by slaughtering the House he was vassaled to at a wedding," Tyrion rambled. "He may be a liar and a coward, but he controls the Riverlands, which are a hub for nearly every other Kingdom. He marshals some considerable strength for a vassal house, some four thousand men, and most importantly, he'll fight for whoever is going to win. At present, that looks like us, Your Grace." The small man shrugged, looking quite pleased with himself.

"One of you tells me to ally with a kinslayer," she sneered, eyes digging into Varys. "And the other tells me to ally with a Kingslayer."

"You don't fear him, Your Grace," Missandei mused softly, a humble smile on her face. Her brown eyes met Daenerys' green ones as she continued. She hadn't spoken through the whole meeting, which was fair. She was naive below her years, and knew little of war or politics. But, there was one thing Missandei knew well that practicaly no one else in the world knew, now : Daenerys herself. "This Walder Frey sounds like he's scared of his own shadow. Maybe he killed his King. What was his name, Lord Tyrion?"

"Robb Stark, Master of Tongues," the Hand replied.

"Robb Stark did not have dragons, my Queen," she said. "Or a hundred thousand bloodriders."

"No, he didn't," Daenerys agreed. "If wants to live to see the world we make, he won't touch me. Is that all, my council?"

"Of the remainder," Tyrion finished. "The Vale of Aryyn has sworn itself to Jon Snow, and the Westerlands are still firmly in the shadow of Casterly Rock. Any Lannisters we don't best in the field or find in King's Landing will be there, Your Grace." He slid from his chair and took hold of several lion statuettes upon the map. "Our intelligence is still . . . tepid, I'm afraid. My sister sees fit to tell no one of her plans but our brother.

"These," he held aloft the figurines, and then scattered them across the middle of mainland Westeros like so many dice. "Could be anywhere. Knowledge of her troop movements should be easier to overhear once we reach Yronwood. As far as the numbers of hosts Cersei can field I-"

"Forgive me, Lord Tyrion," Daenerys interrupts. One slim palm faces Tyrion, silencing him. She sighs, shoulders sagging, wishing to be out of this black Westerosi leather, that chaffed and rashed between her thighs and the small of her back. "I wish to hear no more for now."

"Have I offended you, my Queen?"

"No, but any battle plans made without Olenna Tyrell and Ellaria Sand present mean nothing. We will reconvene at Yronwood, with the rest of our Westerosi allies at the table."

Tyrion opened his mouth to protest, but as Daenerys rose from her seat, the words died in his mouth and he pursed his lips, downing the last of his wine and smiling. "Of course, Your Grace," he said with an affect of geniality she could tell was forced. "If there is nothing else for the night . . .?"

"No," she said, eyes hard and impatient.

"Then I will find you on the morrow. There's much work to be done. Lady Greyjoy reports we have only a few more nights between us and Dorne."

Daenerys could have groaned. That was what Yara had said weeks ago, and her charts had been completely off, and the ships had meandered about the Stepstone islands for nearly three days, ineffectually scouting around and between them for a path back out to the ocean. Her advisors had conveniently forgotten the presence of pirates skulking about in the Stepstones, and a whole ship of Unsullied had been killed before Yara's ironmen and Rhaegal fell upon them. Now the Stepstones had a new reef of shattered sellsail vessels, but the Targaryen fleet had been that much more bogged down, that much slower. She dreaded another of Yara's mistakes, and the confrontation with her uncle. If a ragtag band of thieves could lay low her best soldiers, what horrors would Euron Greyjoy loose upon them?

Tyrion's bow and waddling exit from the room seems to let the rest of the assemblage off for the night. Yara and Theon headed for the upper decks and their own ship Salthammer, Varys follows Tyrion back to the Hand's quarters, and Grey Worm takes Missandei's hand as he leads her back to his own sparse room, typical of even the highest ranking of the Unsullied. Daenerys blushes at the thought that the two would be up to something markedly different than Tyrion and Varys would. Word games and love games had estranged rules.

Now it was only Qhono, standing, staring at her, his Queen. He'd taken the seat previously occupied by Missandei. He's closer to her now.

"They challenge you, Khaleesi," he breathes in guttural Dothraki. "The eunuch and the half-man."

"They advise me, blood of my blood," she replies, her pale hand now swallowed whole in Qhono's dark one. "There's a difference. They know the prize better than I. I am the dragon, and they tell me who to burn."

Qhono gnashes his teeth. " A Khaleesi burns the plain if she likes. A dragon is not a slave. A dragon is not on a leash. This is what you say, no?"

"I do not wish to burn the plain."

"Do you wish this, or does the eunuch?"

She rounded on him, her hand ripped from his and her eyes aflame. "I am the Queen. Do not think that because you share my bed you can question me. My goals are mine, born of tragedy you could not fathom. My advisors are here to bring that about and serve me, including you. If any of you try to keep me from the Iron Throne, I will relieve you."

Now Qhono stood up from his chair, riding vest and furs framing his shoulders to make him appear larger than he actually was. Suddenly, the Dothraki didn't seem so sick. His eyes were wide and black and stabbed completely through her with the kind of intensity expected only from one's lover or one's murderer. He towers over her, arakh close by, making Daenerys unsure which of them he was about to become.

"This is you, Khaleesi," he murmurs as he approaches her, boots he had stolen from one of the Stepstones pirates clicking on the floor. He's inches from her now. "This is the glory you let Khal Moro see before he died."

His hands come to her elbows, and she can feel her rage peter out a bit. Occasionally, Qhono impresses her with what his people call "honey-talk". She'd see fantastic and terrible things in Essos, but an eloquent Dothraki was rare indeed.

"This is the dragon," Qhono whispers. "This is the beast that humbled our hordes in Vaes Dothrak."

"Is that why you follow me? For my cruelty?"

"For your strength, Khaleesi."

"From all I know, your people see them as one and the same."

"As you are beast and woman. The Stallion That Mounts The World."

Daenerys turns away from him, a mournful pang in her heart at the mention of the title. Last time she heard it uttered in that melodic and brutal tongue, she'd been a waiting mother, with all the hope and all the world growing in her belly, a horde of followers who adored her, and a lover who could protect her against anyone who ever dared to harm her. Now, all of it was gone, and yet not truly.

Now she had changed versions of all three. She is mother not to a babe but colossal, fire-breathing death machines. Now slave-soldiers and Westerosi stand behind her where once was only a legion of Dothraki. And where, a million years ago, Drogo had run his hands along her abdomen and smiled, now there was Qhono. Slimmer, younger, fairer than his predecessor, and yet Daenerys fears she has only welcomed him into her arms because he looks too much like that feared Khal of yesterday.

"Do not call me that," she said in a hushed voice. "That was my son. Dead and buried, riding beside his father in the Night Lands."

Black leather presses tight to her body as Qhono's palm cups the tiny swell of fat on her stomach, still left even after years of infertility by little Rhaego. Daenerys feels a broad nose against her hair, and a long braid bearing several bells snakes over a shoulder to mingle with her own platinum locks; unkempt black to rivery white. It smells of grass and blood, of coppery bronze and of horses.

"You girdle the Dothraki," Qhono defied with a husky voice. "You girdle the slavers. You girdle their soldiers and their slaves. You girdle the men in their iron suits, or else you burn them. All the people of the world are your herd, Khaleesi."

"And if I lose everything, again? What if I fail them? My House, the memories of my brothers and my father . . . what if they go unavenged? What if I'm defeated?"

Qhono's hand locks along the lengthy plaits of hair that Missandei had tied tightly for her earlier that day, feeling the ribs and curls of quartz between its fingers. Once Daenerys feels it reach the end of her hair, it pulls, hard. Her neck is bared to the room, slight and pale and blank. Her scalp erupts in stinging pain, but the last of Daenerys' doubts are shouted out by the sweet music of her own moans.

"Then cut off your braid, Khaleesi, and start again," he growls, teeth sinking into the soft, nubile flesh of his Queen's neck.


	6. Gendry I

GENDRY

Through the thickets of tree branches, the proud lions emblazoning their shields are almost invisible, golden ghosts wrought in torchlight. Blankets of dead leaves and rotting plant matter tickle his belly, just at the spot where his armor and undershirt ride up. He'd have to make adjustments in the buckles after the men before him were dead. It'd be a pity to mangle such lovely steel, especially that which he'd crafted himself. But it would be preferable to a sword passing right through his guts where the plate did not cover.

Gendry soldiers through broken pines and insects wriggling through the underbrush, his elbows carrying him, where his warhammer-carrying hands could not. Sticks and old bark crack under him, and similar sounds follow behind him with the rest of his men. The Lannister men occupying the road in front of them are too occupied in fearful chatter to think of what might be sneaking through the forest towards them, so he doesn't worry. Tonight is a moonless night, so any steel they carry doesn't reflect the light and alert the enemy to their presence. By the time the torches they carry start catching Gendry's armor, it would be too late.

He's gotten so close he can hear them now. All fourteen of them dart their eyes from tree to tree, trying to turn over every stone and bush for signs of Baratheon men. Each has a sword out and glinting in orange flame, but with keen eyes Gendry notes notches in the blades, cracks in the metalwork. Their shields are dented, their faces bloody. Each man, no matter his age or stature, is haggard, breathing hard and sweating harder. The torchlight makes the bags under their eyes clear. His men had hit this particular group of Queen Cersei's men hard. Now he'd finish the job.

A man behind him taps him on the shoulder, elbowing his way to the front of the group with a bow in hand and an arrow nocked. A stag wrought in green instead of the signature Baratheon black rears proud on his armor.

"Which one do I hit?" he asked. "I could nail that big one right under his gorget."

"These men are about to pass out," Gendry replied. "Let Reman and the men-at-arms get them. We've been fighting for months now; one last bit of fun before we head back to Storm's End?" He flicked his chin towards the other side of the road and the thick brush that lay there, where Reman Storm led the other band of fighting men to finish off this Lannister host. Gendry imagined he wouldn't sleep much tonight, and might just lead the men he'd put him in charge off through the country, looking for lions, a while longer.

Gendry can just barely see the other band slithering over the forest floor like metal snakes. The Lannister men, however, are completely oblivious

Gendry pointed a mailed finger towards the youngest of the enemy band; a boy with a youthful face that couldn't have been older than sixteen. "Leave him alive, though," he ordered.

"More than a few of the men here were prisoners of the Lannisters during the war," Gendry says. "I saw what they did to people who couldn't help themselves." His strong, bearded jaw locked, memories of Raff the Tickler and and Amory Lorch surging through him.

"We're not the Mountain's men.I won't slaughter a boy who can't even grow a beard."

Across the road, a gleaming polygon of orange light emerges from a bush, long and sharp as the man holding it follows it from the trees. One of the Lannister men looks upon it and screams just before the sword curls upward and removes his head.

"They're all around us!" one shrieks.

"For Casterly Rock!" yells another.

"FOR STORM'S END!"

From both side of the dirt path, warcries resound. Gendy rises from the ground, grips the haft of his hammer in both hands, and charges through the trees.

The reach of the weapon is long, so the dark steel head of it caves in the first man's breastplate before he even realizes he's dead. He crumples as the air fills with voices and Gendry brings the hammer down to shatter his skull. Another man charges him, more experienced than the first. One dread swing of the hammer is dodged, and the imperfection in Gendry's armor almost gets him speared on the man's sword before he can parry it with the hammer's long haft. His knuckles splinter the Lannister man's teeth, disorienting him, and the hammer head obliterates his ribs. He finds another opponent, and out of the corner of his eyes he sees five pairs of gold and green-garbed men dueling, swords shattering, axes finding purchase in bone and brain. One Lannister's arms are both severed before his head joins them in a pile of warm, dead flesh. Another cuts down one Baratheon man before an arrow of black iron strikes him through his golden helmet from afar. Gendry claims his third kill when he knocks away his enemy's helmet in a glancing blow and beats in his head with it.

The Lannister men fight with desperate, brittle fury, but that of the Baratheon men was stronger, imprinted in their very House words, and before long it is over. Thirteen golden-clad corpses litter the road, thirteen lion shields bloodied, broken apart and joined by three dead men in green. Screams pierce the air, and Gendry whips around to find one of his own men, with frenzy in his eyes, pressing a dagger against the throat of the boy he meant to spare.

"No!" he roars, throwing the brain-stained hammer to the ground.

The cry is enough to give the Baratheon man pause, just enough for Gendry to tackle him off the bloody Lannister soldier. The knife slashes across his palm and cuts deep, but he barely feels it as he straddles the other man's torso, pinning his arms and beating the blade from his hand.

One swift blow to his face, and all the fight goes out of him. The man groans and buries his bloody face in his hands as Gendry rises from atop him.

Angelic face and long hair lit by the flickering of dropped torches and marred by a crimson slash across his cheek, Reman pushes through the milling ranks of soldiers he'd led from across the road. His grey eyes betray no pity for the dead Lannisters, nor joy at seeing his comrades through. Sometimes Gendry's worried by the sheer nothing behind his fellow bastard's eyes. Sometimes Reman's loyalty helps Gendry to forget how the void inside him troubled him.

His lieutenant hauls the last living soldier to his feet. Gendry plods through blood and dirt, towering over the boy with broad shoulders and muscles cording through his arms like serpents.

"You know who I am, Lannister?" He says, planting his hammer in the dirt. The flames wring demons across the lad's face, twisting writhing shadows that seem to make his fear transparent.

"Y-you must be the new Storm K-king," the boy whimpers. "P-please, I don't want to die."

"I'm no King," Gendry replies. "The smallfolk gave me the name, but I'm just an angry man who had his family wronged, and lost his father. Just a man who's tired of bullies. You look young, boy. You can't have been a man-at-arms for Cersei for very long. Where'd they take you from?"

"Your Grace?"

"Shut it with the 'Your Grace'. I asked you a question. Where did men in golden armor take you from, to make you fight for someone you don't believe in?"

A look of realization comes across the boy's face, as though the adrenaline of imminent death has burned out of him and it occurs to him he may yet see the light of day. He takes off his helmet.

"I . . . I'm from Lannisport," he says.

"And what happened when they came for you?"

As he thinks on it for a moment, the boy's brow furrows and his eyes set hard against his pale, dirty face. The knots of muscle and bone at the hinges of his jaw tighten. Where fear of death had vanished in him, a steely rage had risen.

"I recognize that look," Gendry whispers, grinning. "Tell me what they did to you."

"The City Watchmen kicked in the door to my father's house," he began. "They cut him and our dog down when they tried to fight back. Some man-at-arms clocked me across the head, and then I was on a carriage what with fifty other men, being unloaded in Casterly Rock."

"You hear this, men?" Gendry called. Any of the Baratheon men who had not milled about Gendry and the boy closed in. "You hear the way she shits on her own people? What they do to those who have the courage to stand up to them?  
"Everybody here's got a story like yours, boy," he growled to the boy. "Everybody here's had the Lannisters kick them while they're down. I think you'll be in good company."

The surety and rage on his face melted away, and he was the same small, frightened thing he'd been a few moments before. "In good company?"

"Aye. I'm offering to let you fight for me. To take it to every Lannister camp you know about, and to take it to King's Landing when the time comes. "

"The . . . " he began. "The camps are all gone."

Men murmur all around him. Some roar in rage, some call the boy a liar and scream for his head. Others quietly debate amongst themselves.

"Quiet, all of you," Gendry sighs. "Where have they all gone?"

"King's Landing."

Relief surged through Gendry. All his efforts had been rewarded. The enemy had been driven from his home, and all it had taken was isolated guerilla attacks that had been done with a fraction of the Lannisters numbers. Now to return home, marshal what Storm Lords would care to treat with him, and then put the lion down in earnest.

"They'll be back."

Everything froze.

"They're reconnecting with a host from Duskendale and one from Dragonstone. Some fifteen thousand. I heard Jaime Lannister was at their head. At least that's what the last senior officer I saw said before he got filled full of arrows."

Now the men about him reeked of fear instead of rage. Gendry doesn't quite share such dismay. His is a shade lighter; only a quiet disturbance and grim acknowledgment that the victory he'd envisioned only moments before was as intangible as his father Robert's ghost. How many separate groups were scattered across the Stormlands? How many men in all? Likely no more than five thousand, and the greater portions were smallfolk with subpar training.

"And where are they going?"

"What's the only place in the Stormlands that could be any threat to them?"

"Then there's only one thing to do," Reman interjected. "We have to retreat. Gather all our strength in the castle and defend it."

"I'll handle that," Gendry replied. "Reman, take a hundred men and deliver warnings to Bronzegate for any fighting men who come there to rest. Tell anybody you see to head for Storm's End. Send a dozen or so to Evenfall Hall."

"Done," Reman nodded. "But . . . Tarth? We're asking Selwyn for his men again?"

"He'll listen once we tell him the Lannisters are coming to reassert control of all our lands. Won't be long till they sail to Tarth. If we have him backing us, the rest of the Storm Lords might follow him."

"Understood," Reman replied.

"The rest of you," Gendry cried. "Let's move! I want to be out of the Kingswood when the sun comes up!"

The milling crowd of men melted, and the din of general conversation rose up like smoke from fire. Men tore their swords from enemy corpses or looted the dead, Baratheon and Lannister alike. Torches that had burned a little low were replenished with Lannister cloaks, and what little gold each of the enemy soldiers had carried was divided as equally as was possible. Gendry pushed the boy in front of him without a word, keeping his eyes on him, as well as the disgruntled men around him who likely didn't feel at ease leaving a man who wore that golden lion alive.

"I take that as a yes, as far as fighting the Lannisters goes?" he asks the boy.

"If I come back alive, they'll execute me for desertion. If I don't get caught by your men first. One way or another the Queen is going to find me. After what she did to the Tyrells . . . I hope I die fighting." He shakes his head, dabbing a bit of blood from his temple with the end of his red cloak.

"Aye, maybe she will," Gendry replies. "And with you she'll find thousands of swords manning the walls of Storm's End, a castle that dragons couldn't take.

"Our Storm isn't weathered yet."


	7. Jon II

JON

Against the total darkness, the milky-white, flaming blade was like a million suns blasting against his eyes. He could barely keep them open under the glow's assault, though he forced them to take the punishment as the icy spear came for his belly. Jon swipes it away and it retreats back into the howling shadows. The fiery sword in his hands reveals a cone of light around him, perhaps a few feet in diameter but no more. Beneath his feet the snowy, bloody ground shifts; the patchwork of rotting hands underneath him writhes, a grasping nest of graveworms coming for him. He slashes at the limbs, the great divinity of his blade driving him forward, filling him with energy. Jon carves through them like butter. Red and blue flicker and dance around him as the fire consumes ominous, unblinking blue eyes. For the first time in years he feels powerful, hopeful; here, with this fateful sword in his hands, Jon and the dead are finally on even ground.

The wights fall in droves. Scores of them pad out of the darkness like wolves, and scores of them are slain. They are lambs before the fire, cowed and destroyed by it. The flames lick their way up the blade, past the crescent crossguard and all the way to the blazing sun carved on the pommel. Crawling up his arm, the fire burning away his fatigue. Jon is swallowed by it now, filled with its vitality and might; unfailing, unflagging, undistinguishing. His whole body glows white hot, and through the hordes of wights he presses on, the sun itself made a man.

A sonorous cry perforates the burning darkness, and the wights either fall and die, consumed by the flames, or scatter like ants back into the depthless, roaring shadows. The wind dies instantly. Any speckles of pale snow fade from the air. The fires eating at Jon's slain adversaries burn low. The night is totally and terribly silent.

He strides out of the all-devouring blackness as noiselessly as mist.

The eyes give him away before Jon can even see him. He remembered this gaze. The disturbing mix between hatred and dispassion still terrified him, years after it'd bored into him from across the water at Hardhome. Now, there's a shadow of sadistic mirth behind the suffocating blue of the Night King's eyes. His arms are splayed triumphantly about him, horizon-thin spear in hand . . .

But he's distorted. The reflective, darkened ice that simulated his humanoid body was warped and twisted, as if it had thawed only to be frozen again in its half melted shape. Where once there had been lean, sculpted power in the Night King's body, now he was grotesque and ungainly. His entire right side slanted downwards, giving him an awkward gait not unlike a dwarf or hunchback; his horns had lost their points, now little more than gentle curves rising from his scalp. His dark steel armor, of no make Jon had ever seen, was blackened and scorched beyond its usual color. Sections of it appeared depressed and smelted, like they'd been fused to the Night King's freezing skin.

By far the most terrible thing, though, was how the great White Walker didn't even seem to notice. Still he comes at Jon with as great a swagger and grace as he can muster on stunted legs and droopy features; as if he'd not been wounded at all. His eyes still glow that terrible blue, brighter than Jon had even seen it.

He is still as deadly as ever.

Jon hears the slavering roars of the wights around him, the pitch and volume of their cries rising until it's replaced the whistle of the wind almost entirely. The Night King turns his head slowly, left, and then right as his horde surely surrounded he and Jon in the darkness; where once his movement had sounded like water freezing, it now split the air, like one of the glaciers beyond the Wall abruptly splitting in half.

The flames surrounding Jon illuminate the Night King's face from across the spit of ground between them, and the deformed features do not shift once. He's is a blank slate, incapable of being read or showing mercy.

Jon charges him, not intent on showing any in return.

They dance back and forth, Jon driving the Night King back at every point. The circle of illumination around him grows larger as he hammers his opponent, raining ferocious blows down upon the Night King's guard. One swipe at the hip, one at his face, another three at his breast, arm and breast again, a stab between his arms. All the while there is nothing in the Night King's face that suggests fear. It is the same resting, indefatigable visage Jon saw at Hardhome, and the same that had greeted untold numbers of unfortunates in their last moment.

Jon roars, and with a great overhead slash, the Night King's spear explodes. The tiny shards of ice scatter in a million directions like ten thousand diamonds. Jon shields his eyes. The shards only hiss out of existence as they touch the roaring flames around him.

Jon feels his arms guide his milky blade forward, though his vision is as shrouded as the blackness around him. Shredding through the air is a great clang. Impact cracks up his arms as the white sword lodges its blade deep in some marbled surface. Lighting his eardrums on fire, a second noise pierces the darkness; a shatter, like a hundred thousand slivers of glass clattering to the ground.

The wights cease their snarls, and sound vanishes once more. Even Jon's heartbeat quiets, as if the gods had snatched it from his chest . . . or he, too, had joined the Army of the Dead.

His eyes open. The Night King is gone. The great swarm of wights about him has fallen, as one, to the ground. Not an eye among them is blue, and they slump against each other with a great weight Jon has learned that only corpses have; the White Walkers' soldiers will never rise again, and were truly dead once more. In the new, greater light, Jon can see who and what they'd been in life. Many were swaddled in rotting furs and leathers of Free Folk make, wielding their stone and bone weapons with the rare metal or dragonglass spear here or there. There were Night's Watchmen in bloodstained black cloaks, pale, dead faces stark against their dark garb. Northern bannermen had fallen in droves. Speared among the snow and bloody stones were tattered banners; Manderly merman, Glover gauntlet, Umber giant, and others great and small. Men piled high and stinking amongst the sigils, whole hills and ravines made entirely of necrotic skin, frayed mail and steel, bashed in and broken. Other, stranger bodies knotted together in their great mass graves. Some wore southern mail and steel. Plumes of feathers stained red with blood rose from battered helmets of some of the dead men, and golden lions worked into the platings had been wrent apart, hacked and chipped at. Joining the Northern direwolves and giants and battle axes were Lannister lions, tattered green roses and Baratheon Greyjoy krakens and Arryn falcons, horses, the sun itself, plain black banners, eastern sunbursts and harpies and a thousand other crests of kingdoms west and east that Jon couldn't name.

But standing proud, unstained, and unblemished above the other banners was a three-headed dragon, set in blood-crimson upon black cloth, staked high upon a hill.

Here was where the fields of the slain grew truly strange. Now the bodies were no longer even Westerosi. Jon steps between them, around them, through them when he had to, his steps punctuated by the crunch of old and brittle bones. The blaze along his sword makes each corpse appear more gaunt than it truly was, digging the facial depressions made by decomposition a thousand miles deeper.

These men wore no steel, only slim and agile black leather. Every exposed head was bald, though many of those Jon beheld had plated, spiked helmets hiding their faces. They were shorter and thinner than the Westerosi wights, their skin the color of deep caramel. Other wilder, stranger warriors gathered flies and maggots in the new terrain of bodies; their armor was fur and horsehide, and they were hairy and broad where their counterparts weren't. Their circular, crescent weapons that one might call swords were almost as strange to Jon as the burning one he held in his hand.

The light grew brighter, and brighter, a shy sun burning behind the hills in the distance. Its glow and the blade's join. The cone of light around Jon grows stronger and stronger. The world unfurls out of the aging darkness anew. Old gray walls flash to life. Squat towers of dark stone erupt from the white earth like teeth biting into an apple. Winterfell traces itself into existence before him. Kennels where dog and direwolf had shared space in Jon's youth appear. The forge where he'd watched Arya's sword Needle being born belches into life, scattered embers lingering in space as if they'd burned into the very air. The broken tower where Bran had taken his fall stabs out of the northern wall, and before long the Great Keep rumbles into being. As its crenellations and awnings come into being, the Keep blocks out the light itself. Jon finds himself under a giant's shadow.

Jon's eyes widen as he scans the length of the castle. The likeness was uncanny, and yet here it was, the Winterfell of his childhood. Muddy and windswept, an island of dull colors in the midst of a sea of green. The dream of summer has melted all the snow, and Jon's nostrils fill with scents he hasn't smelled in years. Weirwood sap, wet hounds, summer rain, morning dew, bale and dung and the stone walls dripping with water, fresh timber. All of it, more powerful than it ever had been while awake. Not even in his wolf-dreams could he divine so much from a single whiff of the air.

He half expects to see Farlen walking a few hounds across the yard or hear Mikken pounding away at swords or breastplates as he ducks under the north gate. Jon swears he can hear Hodor spluttering excitedly on the other side of one of Winterfell's inner walls.

His heart leaps from his chest, and he laughs heartily. The troubles were over. The Night King was dead, his generals shattered and his army returned to their graves. The Lannisters and all their lackeys were out there, dead and broken against Winterfell's walls. Somehow, all the Starks still alive would find their way here. Arya would be here, ready to have her hair tussled just like he used to, and hopefully knowing how to use Needle by now. Bran would follow, and he would walk and climb and ride as he'd wanted so desperately. He would be Ser Brandon and his tales would be legendary.

There they were! Their voices rang along the jingling winter air, crossing over the walls and towers between them and Jon. They were different; Bran had become a man and Arya a woman, but Jon would've recognized their inflections anywhere. He hears them again. They're talking- laughing with someone. One of them asks a question and Sansa's voice answers. Yes, they've come, all of them, his family. They've heard of his victory and now they can rest, at home and together, forever.

He just has to get to the Godswood. As the fiery leaves catch his eye, they glow. The longer Jon looks, the more the heart tree seems to have sprouted blades of molten coals where its leaves had been. It's calling him.

My eyes have found what you crave. Your pack is at peace, Jon Snow. They are here.

The grass is playfully ticklish against his feet as he runs. Everything is pure splendor. Jon can feel years falling away from him. The scars on his chest and stomach where he'd been killed melt off his body. The mark along his right cheek vanishes, and his hair falls in his face as he traces through the castle and it grows back to its original length.

Jon delves into a darker world as he passes under the gate to the Godswood, and from that black passage he never reemerges from.

The flaming light that had painted the heart tree had not been some dream-element. The tree was truly on fire, its white bark blackening and peeling off to bleed out fountains of scarlet sap. The blaze ate away at smaller limbs and leaves, dissolving them into tumbles of red hot snowflakes. Jon's breath froze in his chest and he fell to his knees before the heart tree. The flames whorled around it like some kind of typhoon, flickering together completely unlike common fire. The burning tree was like an altar to some terrible god of slaughter whose motives were unknowable, but whose screaming face upturned to the heavens was all too easy to interpret.

Here the wind was fearsome, even with the shelter of Winterfell's walls. It had all the great white fury of winter behind it. The ground was covered in snow within moments, and even the fire seemed dimmed by the frosty gale pouring forth from the shadows. Not even Jon's sword is able to keep them back.

At the foot of the heart tree, several forms slump on top of one another with that same grim weight as those hordes outside the castle. Jon approaches them, his knuckles white, his eyes watery and freezing.

Through the haze he can just make out his father at the bottom of the pile of corpses. Only Ned Stark's head is visible. His mouth is slack, blue eyes empty of any human presence. A thin, darkly exquisite and curved line is drawn across his throat where his head had been cut from his body.

Ned's children, Jon's siblings, sheathe him in a neck-down cask of necrotic flesh. First Robb, riddled with holes from several wounds to his back and chest, then Sansa with half her face carved off of her skull as if by a Bolton flaying knife. Arya's entrails spill over her sisters still body, dry and flaccid, as do Bran's, snaking from the tear in his torso where his legs should have been. Lastly, sprouting an arrowhead from his stomach where Ramsay had shot him, Rickon tops the pile. The red of his fresh blood clashes terribly with the deep blue of their eyes.

None of them had blue eyes in life.

Jon's father is the only one who rises, though the eyes of every wight burn as intense a blue as those of a true White Walker's. He rips his way out of the lattice of corpses, pulling Robb's arm from his socket and taking a dry strip of muscle from his son's elbow when the limb will go no further. Ned Stark's wight claws, rips, pulls, and a scattering of times, eats his way through the prison of his dead children. Jon can't move, can't speak, his soul paralyzed and soured as the wight stumbles towards him. Though it's cracked and notched and covered in blood, Jon can still recognize Ice, Ned's greatsword, dragging through the snow from the wight's hand.

The heavy footsteps cease. The weight and the glow of the pale blade disappear from Jon's grip. His own body and Ned's wight are all he can see now.

Before his eyes, Ice ripples and withers, the Valyrian steel turning paler and paler as it lengthens and becomes nearly invisible. The pommel grows into a long, cloth-wrapped haft, and Ned Stark raises the icy spear above his head.

Jon's vision turns black just before the wight can strike him down.

He falls, and rises. He's torn left and right, up and down, his flesh bending through the darkness like light through a prism. The nightmare cascades him through open, black air, and now he can see nothing. Jon screams, and yet, he is glad to have his sight stolen. His eyes bore him only terrors, but the dark was safety.

Jon falls, and falls, and then he falls no more.

The void is ripped asunder and the world shouts back into existence. His hearing takes longer than his eyes, so Jon doesn't hear Maester Wolkan shouting or his own screaming immediately.

"Your Grace!" he reads off Wolkan's lips, the words only just being registered, and sounding quite underwater. The Maester shakes him by the shoulders. "Your Grace! It's alright! It's alright! Breathe!"

Jon's screams trail off in a hoarse croak, and he sucks in air desperately. Even, gentler breaths come as he clenches a hand on Wolkan's arm. What was the castle Maester doing in his chambers? Had Sansa called on him to bring Jon to her? Had he been crying out in his sleep? What time was it? Light peeked out in a soft radius from behind his curtains. How long had he slept that he didn't wake to a black morning?

"Open . . ." Jon commands, perhaps a bit too loudly. "Open the curtains. I . . . I want this room lit, now."

"My King, your sleep was troubled all through the night. It is still very early. Perhaps some milk of the poppy to give you a few hours rest?"

Jon groans and flies from his bed, clad only in smallclothes. Striding to the curtains guarding his window and threw them open. The light is soft like those of the long summer's Northern mornings, but like the wars to come, it would only become harder from here.

"I can't sleep right now, Wolkan," Jon said, staring out into the featureless grey sky for a moment. "It's the waiting that's killing me, I think. The Night King could be out there right now, climbing the Wall, or freezing the sea, and all we can do is sit in this castle and wait for him to come destroy us. We have no idea where he's marching, and all he need do is chase the people fleeing south. We'll lose our minds in here. Might be the Army of the Dead marches to Winterfell and finds we've destroyed ourselves."

When Wolkan doesn't reply, he turns and smiles sadly at the Maester.

"I'm sorry," Jon concedes. "I shouldn't have . . ."

"Don't be, Your Grace," Wolkan replies warmly. "Being in the King's confidence is not the duty of a Maester. But, man to man, my ear is yours when you need it."

Jon nods, meeting his eyes. "Thank you, Wolkan. Suppose I should dress now."

"Aye," the Maester agrees. "I imagine the Hand would not appreciate you coming to break your fast nearly in the nude."

"Is there something Sansa needs? She hasn't dined with me since I decided who sat my Council."

"Far be it for me to question Lady Sansa's commands. Perhaps she only wants to start her day in her brother's company."

Jon had to nod at that. It was more than likely Sansa only wanted to see him. Old Gods knew he had seen precious little of her the last few weeks. Her new duties as the Hand of Winter had her busy, chiefly with finding enough foodstuffs to accommodate tens of thousands of wildlings, Giants, and the great numbers of smallfolk who had fled their lands north of Winterfell in terror and settle around the great fortress or in the Winter Town. Between that and laying down the hammer of judgment on Northmen who didn't care for wildlings with Lyanna Mormont, or trying to sway the Knights of the Vale from loyalty to Littlefinger, Jon had seen her so rarely that she might as well have been back in King's Landing. King's Landing, the city where she'd learned how to maneuver men like figurines on a map from the best of the best.

Jon loved his sister, but he felt more than a little like a figurine now.

More than a few times she'd coldly brushed off his offers to eat together in the name of "duties of the Hand". Jon hasn't seen enough of her to know if she resents him for giving her the office. He suspects she does, but she's been hardened by the years as much as he has. She's icier, more merciless. Maybe he was only feeling the aftereffects of her disposal of Ramsay Bolton.

"I suppose I'll find out from her myself," Jon replied. "Let her know I'll be there shortly. And thank you, Wolkan. For your offer."

The Maester grinned and bowed his head, his chain turning pale as it caught the light. "Of course, Your Grace," he said as he left the room.

As soon as Wolkan leaves and Jon approaches his wardrobe, Ghost abruptly rolls up from his spot on the rug of skins, mouth wide in a silent howl as he yawns deeply. His depthless red eyes watch Jon as he dresses, waiting for his master to leave the room so he could sneak a blood sausage or two from under the breakfast table.

Jon chooses a pair of near featureless black-leather boots, and a long-sleeved brown tunic, tied by several laces down his pectorals and stomach and high on his throat. The gloves he omits; the heat below the ground seemed to be seeping back into the walls, and his hands instantly began to sweat when he put them on. The outfit was a favorite of his. Most of the clothing he wore as King In The North was too ornate, or made uncomfortable by being ornate, the crown worst of all. The tunic he wore now was emblazoned by only a spot or two of dust. It was humble and guileless, similar to his black cloak and doublet from the Night's Watch. Likely he only wishes to wear the black again, and be borne back to simpler times. He ties a baldric about his waist and slides the blade of Longclaw through it.

Ghost rises to all fours as Jon puts his hand on the doorknob, and he chuckles, patting his thigh. Trotting over and earning a scratch behind the ears after he licks Jon's wrist, they walk to the Hand's chambers together.

Jon enters the room to find Sansa at a short and unassuming dining table, tucking into white cheese and bread, with a pear and a glass of wine off to one side. Another set of food is splayed out in front of her, apparently for him. There is a small hill of bacon set upon the plate, topping darker bread which the fat drizzles and flavors, a strip of salt fish, and another glass of wine.

Sansa digs into her food ravenously, but the moment she glances up and sees Jon in the doorway she wipes her face and stops eating.

"Do I get to sit down, or do I have to wait in the doorway for a bit?" he quips. Sansa's face doesn't shift at all.

"Just close the door." she replies, hushed and conspiratory.

Ghost dashes through before the door closes, and settles by Jon's seat as he takes it.

"I've barely seen you these past few weeks," Jon begins, tentatively lifting a stretch of bacon into his mouth. "How are you?"

"This came by raven this morning," Sansa says. She slides a roll of new parchment across the table, only slightly ripped where the raven's talons had gripped it.

Unfolding it, Jon reads :

To The King and Kingdom In The North,

The true Queen has returned. Daenerys Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Protector of the Realm, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons is landing in Westeros.

Send envoys to Yronwood in Dorne, and restore the pacts of fealty that bound Houses Stark and Targaryen for centuries under the true royal bloodline. All Northern Lords and Ladies will retain their titles, lands, and incomes should they bend the knee. House Stark will be made Wardens of the North, as they were under Aegon the Conqueror. All those who pledge loyalty to Queen Daenerys will be accepted back into the fold as friends, with no charges levied concerning their past misdeeds.

However, those who do not bend the knee will be taught the true meaning of 'Fire and Blood', as they were under Aegon the Conqueror.

Rejoice! Align yourself with House Targaryen, and together we will end the suffering that has plagued this country forever.

Signed,

Lord Tyrion Lannister, Hand of the Queen to Daenerys I Targaryen

Jon sets trades the letter for his glass, taking a long and noisy slurp of wine.

"Is this a Southern threat worthy of your attention?" Sansa says.

Jon sets the win glass down and wipes the scarlet sweetness from his lips, his head resting in his left hand. In the Night's Watch, there had been few men around trafficking tales of the world outside the Wall or Castle Black. There were events pregnant with consequence for Westeros that he'd only heard of weeks after they'd happened. But even on the edge of the world, he'd heard whispers of the last Targaryen across the sea. She had slept in a roaring pyre unscathed, and birthed the last three dragons in all the world. She had torn the Masters of Slaver's Bay from their vice and killed them all, and done the same with scores of Dothraki Khals, rapers and evil-doers in their own right. Jon called her work justice, but at the same time the brutality of it worried him. The Dragon Queen's first answer to a problem seemed to be blasting it with her dragons.

And Jon's own people would damn him to the seven hells they didn't believe in if he bent the knee. Which meant Daenerys Targaryen would see Jon Snow and all the Northern Lords as a very big problem.

"Why couldn't you bring this before the Council?" Jon asks.

"Because I know what you'll do with the information, and I know how they'd all take your decision," Sansa replies, brushing a strand of hair from her face and nibbling a bit at her bread.

"And what exactly will I do with it?"

"You'll go down south, alone, to treat with her, because that's what you've always done. I made you come to me so I could tell you not to go."

"What are you talking about?" Jon has to stifle a laugh, despite the prospect of dragons and White Walkers falling on Winterfell in the near future. He had been thinking about seeking Southern allies; the Army of the Dead could not be stopped with twenty thousand men. Jon had been considering someone other than Daenerys Targaryen, and if he told even Sansa, nevermind the Northern Lords, he might as well give her his crown and disappear into the Wolfswood right now.

Sansa must have heard the laugh. She leans back in her chair, growling and tearing a whole hunk of cheese off the block on her plate with her teeth.

"That's what you've always done, Jon," Sansa manages to say through her food. "Always the hard decision, always the one that puts you right in the heart of danger. It makes you easy to love and easy to be enraged with."

Incredulity rises in his chest, flecked with rage. "You'd prefer I didn't go?"

"Of course I would. It's a stupid idea, to leave your people just as winter starts with an army of dead men bearing down on us and try to win an alliance with a woman who leads Dothraki and dragons by appealing to her love for her 'people'! What does it say about her that she's comfortable around savages like that?"

Jon bit into the end of his salt fish. "I think there's merit to her. Every horrible thing she ever did was to protect people."

"Including what she'll do to us if we don't submit to her?"

"That won't matter. The Night King will kill us all before she even finishes getting the South in order. But if she joins us in the North first, we'll have over two hunded thousand allies and three dragons greeting the Walkers."

"And what then, Jon?" Sansa asks angrily, as if daring her brother to try and convince her. "What happens after we win?"

Jon smiles wryly. "I don't know that we will. But I'd feel better about it with dragons on our side."

Her features soften, and Sansa for the first time in a long time looks terribly sad. Jon reaches over and takes her hand in his, squeezing as hard as he can without hurting her.

"You're going, then," Sansa said with a note of finality.

"I have to, Sansa," he replies.

"So everything I told you about needing a Small Council means nothing?" She shoots back. "That you weren't ready for a crown?"

"You're the one who decided not to tell them."

"Damn you, Jon. It should have been me."

"What?"

"I should be Queen."

Rage rises in Jon's heart, hotter now and fanned by the realization that he was halfway right. He draws his hand back as though he'd been burned. He almost was a figurine to Sansa, fit to be placed and stationed where she wanted, but not where he knew he had to be. To her, like so many others, the threat beyond the Wall was secondary to the little games and little hatreds of the living.

"This is what's on your mind right now? Envy?" he breathes. "You understand that none of this matters if we're all dead, don't you?"

"I'm sorry if my emotions are so unpalatable to you, Jon," Sansa said quietly. "But some of us plan on still being human and leading lives after this war is over. I got you to try and take back Winterfell. I brought us the Knights of the Vale when you lost the Battle of the Bastards. I gave us our home back, and they crowned you King because you're a man." To hear her accomplishments, those he'd mentioned when he'd made her his Hand, thrown back in his face hurt more than a little. But he looks at her again and just sees sorrow.

"I know- I know it's childish," she continues. "It's stupid. But I spent years in King's Landing with terrible men having power over me. Every second I told myself I would never be at anyone's mercy ever again. Not even you."

"Is that what I am?" Jon retorts, shoving bacon into his mouth to keep the vengeful words in his mind from coming out. "Am I a terrible man to you, Sansa?"

"No, of course not."

"No, I'm not. When the last White Walker falls, you can rip the damn crown off my head for all I care. I never wanted to be King."

He sits back in his chair, folding his arms, all of his food suddenly tasting as foul as Sansa's self-importance. Jon's face softens, though as he realizes she's once again only trying to help him. Why else would she want him to stay in the North if not to keep him safe?

All the same, her eyes still light up at the mention of the crown.

"Truly?" she says.

"Completely," Jon replies. "You think becoming King In The North was a power play? I took the crown because I know the Army of the Dead better than anyone still alive, and I know how to beat them. I don't ever want the kind of power over men a crown can bring. When the war is over, take mine. Rule the North. Be the Queen In The North."

"But to win the war, you say we need Daenerys Targaryen."

"Aye, we do."

"So I have to let you leave."

"You're not the only one who's clever."

"When?"

"First light tomorrow. Better to be gone before the Northern Lords wake."

Sansa sits back as well, rubbing Ghost's forehead as he walks along the table to her heel.

"What am I to tell them when the King disappears?" she asks.

"The truth," he answers. "That I've gone to the Riverlands to rally what Lords and men remain there to our cause. The story will still have me seek what I seek; only the names change."

She pinches the bridge of her nose, her brow furrowing. Ghost tries to get his whole slender nose into her hand, and his unrelenting desire to be pet finally prompts a smile on Sansa's face. Seeing it kills the anger in Jon instantly. If he named her an accessory to the dead for letting arrogance disrupt their unity, he was a hypocrite. Jon and his rage were just as guilty.

"Just tell me you aren't going alone," Sansa suggested.

"Of course not. I'll be taking Brienne," he responded. "She's my Kingsguard. I'll need another proper sword on the road. We'll pick up Davos in White Harbor; but he can't fight, as he's so wont to remind me. Neither can Lord Baelish, and he can't be bringing the Knights of the Vale with him."

Sansa's eyes widened at that. "What? You're taking Littlefinger with you?"

"He's the man who knows how to get in the good graces of strangers the best," Jon admitted."He did it with your mother, with Lady Lysa, the Lannisters, the crown, all of it. Who's to say he can't bridge the gap with Daenerys? Or give us safe passage through the territory Cersei controls?"

"I want him out of here," Sansa said, taking a dripping bite out of her pear. "More than anybody. But ultimately he destroyed everyone who called him an ally. Robert is dead. Mother is dead. Aunt Lysa is dead. Tywin Lannister is dead."

"Another reason why I am taking him to Yronwood, out of Winterfell, away from the protection of his Knights," Jon explained. "Tell me all that he has done to you, and when he is alone and without allies, I'll see to it that justice is served."

Realization dawns in Sansa's eyes when Jon's hand fastens around the gleaming handle of Longclaw, sharp as ever, at his waist.


	8. Sandor I

SANDOR

A single nibble of the dragon pepper, and Sandor is half-convinced his brother has roasted his face over the fire all over again. The juices run over his tongue and leave seared flesh in trails, and where they slither down his chin, there is only blackened skin and burnt beard. He spits it across the table, a cough tearing from his throat. Sandor swears he can see it steam in the sunlight. Immediately the spice takes hold in his mouth, clinging to his lips in a cruel tingle, and his stomach starts to dance. Beric and Thoros, their lips red and cracked as well, both look worried. Inwardly, he blames them both for these particular red-hot woes. It wasn't his fault the Brotherhood had arrived in Yronwood ahead of schedule, and had an unspecified number of days to meander about the city until Daenerys Targaryen arrived.

Sandor is shocked they were let in at all. Anders Yronwood had greeted them from astride the city walls with scores of crossbowmen and scorpions, demanding to know which King or Queen they served, and only Beric's quick courtesies had saved them from a quick death. Beric must have lost his brain in one of his deaths, to think the Dornishmen unable to mistake them for an invading army.

All this is, of course, in the back of Sandor's head, secondary and subdued by way of the volcano that had erupted in his throat. His face is molten rock, his spittle is magma, and the Dornishman across the table just smirks at him.

Equally mocking is the many sided trapezoid of a die on the table, between Sandor and the high, emerald pile of dragon peppers, with its upturned face bearing a single dot. There were fourteen more sides, each adding a number, all the way up to dreaded fifteen. Sandor had, mercifully, rolled for only a single pepper this time. One was enough, but previously that afternoon he had not been so lucky. Judging by the way the many passers-by had eyed the Dornishman while they had played on the streetside, he was infamous for this little roulette. Sandor wondered how many players had felt death coming on as the fifteenth pepper had passed their lips.

Was this really worth the few dented gold dragons, assorted silvers, and coppers his partner had on the table in front of him? Worth avoiding the unending boredom the Brotherhood had found in Yronwood upon their early arrival?

"Your- your turn," Sandor says with half a grunt and half a gag.

"You still wish to play, my friend?" The Dornishman asks, that same stupid and smug grin plastered on his annoyingly handsome face. "You look a little red about the eyes there."

"He's right, you know," Thoros mutters with a rasp, his throat singed from peppers. The old drunk had rolled a terrible seven on his final turn. Needless to say, he much preferred the burn of a swig of wine and would not be playing again, or so he told the Dornishman. "You look like you've got a little buzz on, Clegane. There's fire in your eyes now, too."

"There's a winesink and a bathhouse not five streets down," Beric offers. Of the three of them, he'd felt the wrath of the Dornish food the least. Sandor guesses death dulls the senses. "There're safer ways to waste our time."

"Aye," he admitted. "But I'm angry, and I still have to crush this fucker and get your money back, Dondarrion."

Sandor leans over the table, his armor clanging as it brushes the wood. One hairy hand locks on the plate of peppers and shoves it across the wood to his overconfident enemy. He takes comfort in the fact that, if the man does win and take all their money, he could just cut his head off with the greatsword at his mailed back and retake it.

"I said your turn, cocksucker," he growls. "Eat the godsforsaken peppers or I'll shove them in your other hole sideways. I haven't coughed the things up yet. I've bitten into every one. I haven't lost."

To his indignation, the threat doesn't cow the man at all. One glance was often times all he needed to terrify small men like this one into obedience. It's more than likely obscured by the hood he wears by the advice of Beric. It would not do to have a mob eviscerate him due to the bad blood between House Clegane and Dorne. This particular Dornishman suspects nothing. All he does is nod, and unfurl the dice onto the wood with the measured grace of a practiced gambler.

Five, the die decrees.

Now it's Sandor's turn to grin through a beard moist with piquant fluid. "Mmmm," he parodies, running his tongue across his scorching lips. "Looks good, doesn't it? Nice and juicy, like sausage. Eat up."

"Absolutely, Andal," the Dornishman laughed, adjusting his open-chested doublet. He slid the plate over in front of him, plucking a pepper from the plate and sliding it into his mouth. The man envelopes the pepper behind his lips fulls before he bites down. Sandor watches the misshapen lump of it travel down his throat when he swallows. "You treat this game like it is punishment."

"It is."

"Perhaps up in the Westerlands, friend. Down in Dorne we know all sorts of heats just like this one. We are raised on peppers and sunlight and scorpions."

"Sounds like all that heat melted your brain."

"You would know about such things, yes?"

"Eat your fucking peppers."

He and Thoros both chuckle, but he complies, and the second, third, and fourth go down without a hitch, passing by the apple of his throat and into his proud, sadistic belly. Through all three of the fruits, the Dornishman's face barely twitches out of its smug cast. Only one of these things felt like it was going to kill Sandor; the sting still smoldered on his lips. It can't be real, the ease with which this man took them, it couldn't be. Either it was so hot a pepper that it had driven Sandor insane, and he was seeing things as he ran through the Yronwood markets with his clothes off, or the man was cheating.

There it was again, as the final pepper touched his lips. It slips between them, and then it's gone. His jaw undulates as though he's chewing, but Sandor never sees his teeth split the wrinkly flesh of the pepper. Just before the Dornishman tips his head back to swallow, Sandor rounds the table and throws himself at his opponent, gripping the man by the fringes of his undershirt and raising a mailed fist over his head. Sandor's hood peels from his head, bearing the web of melted flesh on his face to the world.

"Open your fucking mouth, or I'll tear you a new one from ear to ear," he growls. This time, the stare works. Sweetly, the ineffable unflappability of his adversary is gone. Realization breaks over his dark features, and he appears to realize his taunting hadn't brought out the manageable rage in Sandor that he'd hoped for.

His eyebrows raise in a sign of acknowledgment, and there, lying in his unopened mouth, was a single, saliva-slick pepper; a whole pepper.

Sandor reaches for his sword, but a hand on his plated shoulder stops him.

"Put the damn sword down, Clegane," Thoros says, breaking open a flask from his waist and taking a long drag of it. "He's a liar, not a raper or a murderer. We're not executioners."

"What about a robber?" Clegane shoots back. The Dornishman watches the trio in mute but confused terror. "He cheated us out of our money. Thought you remembered what I did to robbers, Thoros."

"Those men slaughtered a village full of innocent men, women, and children," Beric adds in. "Has this man killed anyone?"

Sandor's teeth dig into each other, and his grip on the man's shirt tightens until his knuckles are almost white. Growling, he tosses him to the ground and hocks up a moist, fat glob of spit in his opponent's face. It felt more than good to paw their money back into his own deserving pockets.

"A bit of advice, little man," Sandor grunts. Blinking spit from his eyes, the Dornishman complies, fear written all over his aquiline features. "Don't cheat anyone at this mummer's farce again. Spat on and manhandled's like to be the best you get from here on out."

A slow, struck-dumb nod is all Sandor needs to finally let the man be.

The crowds of Dornish kept streaming by, but only a few seconds after the cheating man had vanished into them, a vicious scream wrent between the groups in the dusty afternoon air.

"Murderer!"

Another, closer this time, mixed in with similar yells. All of them were charged with desperation of one shade or another, borne of the loss of cherished icon after cherished icon, dyed with old hatreds festering in low places. Suddenly Sandor is acutely aware of what Kingdom he's in, and the kind of history it's had with the other six.

It's rather queer, the way the mob emerges from the river of normally-moving smallfolk going about their daily business. In the back of Sandor's mind, behind the repeated, deafening thud of oh fuck, he likens it to sea snakes from Sothoryos he'd heard of from a sellsword once. The man had told him how they could wriggle through water as quickly as on land, how swimming out of the surf and onto a beach didn't slow them up at all. Many a man had found his doom in the vain hope that the creatures couldn't pursue him into the sea, or a lake.

Here there are a hundred snakes, a hundred wending groups of angry people pushing through the crowd, knives and crude shivs or cudgels clutched tight in their hands. Every set of eyes, every mote of hatred falls on Sandor, as if Beric and Thoros aren't there, even as they draw their swords.

"You see him, people of Dorne!" Someone shouts from within the crowd, though the voice grows louder as the owner pushes to the front of the crowd, clad in vests and sandals rich as a Tyroshi Archon's; he's a slender man, with closely-shaven hair and a twiddling mustache. The richness of the blade he carries and the arrogant sneering lines on his face mark him no less an opportunist in Sandor's mind than the man with the dreaded pepper game. "You see the burns on his brow that damn him before the Seven!" By this time, the Dornish not intent on imminently slaughtering the three of them had deserted the street, abruptly and stiffly shutting doors, windows, curtains drawn tight. The mob was a roiling wave of directionless anger, and those simply going about their days didn't plan to get caught up in it. Sandor is only envious of the fact that they had had a choice.

The mob pressed closer now, tightening into a half-oval around the table where the pepper game had been played. Beric and Thoros' shoulders meet with his, and both of their swords snake about the air. Sandor feels considerably more comfortable about their prospects as he draws the bladed pillar of his own huge greatsword. "You know who he is, countrymen! You know how his brother the Mountain broke the skull of Princess Elia Martell, slaughtered her little children in their beds as the castle of his rightful King burned!" The humming roar of the crowd grows louder, and it's all he can do not to laugh. Beric frowns through his beard at him, until he seems to remember that he'd once made to kill Sandor based on some of his brother's atrocities the same as the Dornish mean to. The frown morphs into a blink of a smile.

"Hear me, citizens of Yronwood," Beric commands, even and calm but not at all misunderstanding the crowd's intent. His one good eye burned like a black sun below the shelf of his bandage. "We did not come to your city to spread ill will. We've come to await the arrival of Daenerys Targaryen, who will set this continent free from tyranny and save it from darkness. Sandor Clegane has done great evil in his life, but that life has passed. He has been recruited, as have we all, into a holy war for the very soul of this world. I know the signs of my Lord's touch; some of you here worship R'hllor."

Some in the crowd pause, their crude weapons gripped less surely and the sea of snarling faces was broken by a dozen or so who looked confused and out of place.

"He has judged Sandor Clegane worthy of redemption," Thoros continued. "Those of you who follow our Lord know his forgiveness. And you know what it is to stand against him."

Thoros fasten his bare hand around his sword, drawing it towards the tip, slicing open his palm. But, no blood drooled from him. Where the hand went, luscious flames ate the red ichor whole, coated the metal, burning without pitch or forage. The blade went up like kindling, a belch of flames and boiling blood curling along its edge to the cries of horror and awe from the Dornish crowd. Beric, too, runs his sword through his fingers and watches it burst to life with igneous fury. It seemed as though their would-be murderers were waiting for Sandor's sword to go up as well. The best he can manage is to brandish the heavy thing fiercely and look bigger than his comrades, which was Sandor's second nature.

To his shock, some men and women in the mob clutch their fiery heart amulets, break away from the mass of people, and stow their weapons in robes or dresses, trudging into the amorphous sea of their less than forgiving cohorts. The leader of the mob darts his head back and forth, no doubt counting every man he lost. His saccharine blade dips into the dirt and he shouts curses at them, but they're swallowed by the streets before he can order the rabble to attack them.

He spits on the ground at Sandor's feet, ripping his sword from the ground and rattling it at the massive man.

"The Mountain dishonored us, dishonored all of Dorne, when he killed Princess Elia; we will take from him in kind. These Andals have not been in Dorne long, brothers and sisters," their leader yelled, turning back to the crowd that was beginning to remember their frenzy. "Else they would know that fire is only cuisine here!" Sandor's mind babbles as the angry Dornish close in and he remembers the lying man's commentary on heat.

"Peppers and sunlight and scorpions," he mutters to himself. Sword still angled at the crowd and ready to fight, he finds himself joining in on what seems to be his own unorthodox trial. "For what it's worth, my brother might even pay you fuckers if you stick those daggers in my back. He owns all the Clegane lands, all our incomes and titles. Whoever strikes me last might even get put up in Clegane's Keep; fucker hasn't used the place in years." It was a helpful lie; Talk was that Gregor had rcently joined the Kingsguard for Cersei Lannister, which made Sandor himself the Lord of Clegane's Keep. Not that these Dornish skidmarks in their shit hovels would know any of that.

"If you're trying to make him bleed," Sandor growled, emboldened. "You'll march up to the capital and tear him to pieces with your own hands. I promise you, I'm as hard a mark as he ever was."

The man in the front can see what he's trying to do; even as a few faces in the crowd falter once again, he raises his overcompensating blade and bellows "Kill them all!"

That tide of rage advances on Sandor now, with a few flighty souls trapped in a press of fuming bodies, flowering weapons pointing from their masses like the misshapen teeth of some formless, vague beast. They pull in tighter, a few approaching close enough to swipe at Beric and Thoros. The two red priests slash their bronzed blades in wide arcs, keeping the attackers at bay with flames but not yet serving them the steel that came underneath. Twice a flailing man comes at one of the priests, gripping his stout dirk in both hands like a sword, only to be driven back by the searing heat. After a woman's dress catches fire and she has to roll about in the dirt to put the flames out, the mob treats the blazing swords with proper respect, funneling all of their number to the middle, to Sandor.

He snarls, wolflike, and brings the huge sword down on the first man who approaches him. It is more hammer than blade, bashing through bone and sinew and flesh, casting a heavy, moist arm to the dirt. His adversary screams in pain, though he's cut off by a diagonal slash across his partially-bare chest. Beric screams something at him, but all he can hear is the rush of blood in his ears.

Another comes at him, and another, their rage now fueled by their fallen kin more than the stain on their country's honor. Bodies fall to his left and right, men and women bereft of arms, legs, heads, a patchwork of human wreckage about the street. Dirks birth sparks as they slash across his armor. His sword skewers a Dornishman through the guts and pierces the stomach of the shouting woman rushing behind him. He slices apart a man's sternum from collarbone to rib, and just barely hears the audible splintering of a skull as the blade pummels through it. Two are able to get through his guard, ducking under the sword as it takes the legs off a man who'd overestimated his reach. One tries to puncture between his ribs, and has his cheek split open by Sandor's mailed fist. The other aims high, slashing open Sandor's maligned brow. He cuts her head off in a clean swipe. In the blur of the carnage, he vaguely remembered telling some lackey of Tyrion Lannister about how sweet killing was. Sandor tells himself its only to protect himself, but everyone he kills stares at him with the face of Gregor Clegane.

"Keep fighting! For the honor of Dorne!" commanded the leader of the mob. Sandor had almost forgotten about him. Killing the man was certainly in the question now, with almost a dozen dead bodies surrounding him. He'd stayed on the outside of the melee, a lightning rod for the violent passions of the crowd, guiding them into the suicidal corridor Beric and Thoros had created and keeping them invested in killing the three men before them. Sandor only hears half of what he says, so great is the blood-drunkenness within him. His sword only slows when the Dornish stop coming. He wipes the blood from his eye, and sees them all frozen in place, gaping at their leader and shrinking away from him, his body silent and lifted into the air.

A sword protrudes from the Dornishman's chest, its blade coursing with shifting fire. His eyes are rolled back in his head, blood fountaining from his mouth to coat his chest and the front of his robes, keeping the sword from catching him on fire. Sandor can't see who's killed him, but both Beric and Thoros are right next to him. From behind the aloft corpse, a woman strides, calm and alien, swathed in red robes so thin her shapely body glitters right through them. Her lips are thin, inviting, a pink crescent moon reaching for her chin. Green eyes sweep the massacre, with something between apathy and urgency hidden within them. At her neck a bronze collar is nestled, inlaid with unearthly red stones, and yet she seems to radiate darkness. The sun's light is blocked out by the rise of Yronwood's cityscape around them, but she still casts a long, deep shadow, like the darkness on the edge of a torch's light. Wrongness rolls from her see-through robes like fog; her movements are too smooth, her skin too perfect, her stare too piercing, the shade of crimson she drowned herself in too suffocating. If ever there was credence to the legend of R'hllor, here it stood, wrapped in womanly flesh and blood-silk; she was the avatar of the Lord of Light himself.

"I consecrate you and your false gods, leader of the blind," she spoke, her voice clear and lush and richly accented. "For the Lord of Light R'hllor." She stands flush to the dying man, her side pressed against the flaming sword which singes neither her flesh, nor her clothes. The mob watches with rapt, silent terror, in monstrous awe of the red woman.

She grips the dying man's cheeks in both hands, and presses her lips to his. The stream of blood pools in her mouth, and she coughs, choking through the kiss, and the overflow paints her chin and her whole throat in red that gleams in the sword's light.

Parting her lips from his, her mouth practically salivating crimson, the red woman steps back from him. A few moments of protracted, dread silence stretch on before Sandor notices the man's hand begin to twitch.

His eyes refocus, regaining a living man's awareness, and he screams.

It was a kind of scream Sandor had never heard, not when he'd killed children in front of their mothers or wives in front of husbands. It had no infusion of real, human anguish in it, and it was not at all like the scream brother Ray had described to him. It was ethereal, seeming to echo from all of Yronwood at once, magnified so eerily it could have bounced off the walls of all seven hells. The mob leader's eyes speared through the heavens, their color rapidly liquefying from black to orange. He screams again, all the crowd adding their agonized wails to his and clutching their ears in pain, retreating from the grim monument to R'hllor back down the streets they'd come from.

The man's throat glows a deep, burnt orange.

There is a great scarlet flash, and where once he hung, there is only ash. The sword that had killed him had sprouted a wielder, and old man who fell in behind Melisandre. Before the spots from the arcane detonation have even vanished from Sandor's eyes, Beric was on him.

"They were civilians!" he growls, smashing his fist into Sandor's cheek. His flesh splits open, but no bones crunch against the heavy steel. "They were goaded, and you slaughtered them like those men slaughtered your septon!" Thoros drops his fiery blade, trying to pull Beric back, but his grip is poor and Dondarrion throws him off. Sandor's vision returns, and the next blow is easily caught. He grins as his hands tighten around Beric's wrists.

"Aye, I did," Sandor breathes, pulling the former Lord in close. "And look at the three of us. Still breathing. Don't talk to me like I'm my brother. They came at me and they lost."

"You saw that man!" Beric spits back. "You heard him riling them up, sending them to their deaths! They weren't of sound mind!"

"Or sound fighters. Not one of these fuckers knew how to use a dagger."

"You could have driven them back! Use your sword's reach to keep them at bay!"

"Do you see this thing catching on fire?!" Sandor lets go of Beric, hefting his mighty weapon in his right hand only. Now his voice raises, anger filling it. "Don't you tear into me because I don't wait to be backed into a corner and gutted like some pricey whore!"

"Enough."

Looking up, he finds the red woman dangerously close, and his grip on his sword tightens. Somehow, she'd strode across the miniature battlefield silently, not a stain of blood or dirt on her robes at all. He suspects it would have blended in, to the crimson fabric anyway. The mob leader's blood has been wiped from her mouth, and her gaze is all too imperious. But it is the man beside her that draws his eye.

Sheathed in dark, studded armor and mail undershirt, he had to be nearly sixty years old, with a tight chin and a caramel-salt spread of hair on his lower face. His brow was so wrinkled that it seemed permanently furrowed, and his eyes were dark, sad rings. The hair on his head was well-kempt, and had only become gray with age rather than thin. Crawling up his neck, like Sandor's own burns, was a trail of singed, stony skin, black in most places and grey in some others. It grew thicker and more stain-like as it traveled in a spiral around his neck, from behind his ear to covering the apple of his throat. The sword in his hand blazes from crossguard to tip. Even in his age and with the creep of disease up his body, Sandor knows he recognizes the man from somewhere, some half-memory full of smoke and aching eyes.

Thoros chuckles, sheathing his sword and clapping the priestess' aged bodyguard on the back. The other man seems to have trouble moving his swordless arm, but he returns the gesture as best he can.

"How long?!" Thoros howls. "How long's it been since the siege of Pyke? Since we kicked the shit out of those ironmen bastards? Lord, it's been too long, Mormont! What brings you to fall in with Melisandre of Asshai?"

Suddenly that half-memory unlocks in Sandor's brain, and he can picture it clear as the blood on the dirt before him. There he was, barely an adolescent, his burns fresher and pinker, marching and armed amongst great fields of Lannister soldiers through the broken skeleton of King's Landing, isolated Targaryen reserves slaughtered where they stood or crawled. King Aerys had just opened the gates, practically offering Lord Tywin his head on a platter when the betrayal became clear. As the day wore on and the killing grew crueler, armies from the North and the Riverlands had found the enemy's stronghold and discovered it already conquered. Sandor remembers marching with the army out of King's Landing in that same day, back to the crimson-flagged Lannister camp. Lines of pale Northern faces watched them go, some cursing the Andal oathbreakers, some silently thanking them for putting the destruction to a stop. One face stood out from the crowd, older than the rest, dismayed by the carnage, gold of hair and swathed in pine-green, a roaring bear cresting his chest.

"Too long, Thoros, too long," the man laughs. "I'll speak well of these flaming swords for the rest of my life. I can see why the ironmen were so terrified." He raises the flickering blade aloft, and it shines as well as either of the red priests' weapons.

Thoros' mouth was slightly agape. "She's shared the Lord's power with you?"

Mormont's sorrowful eyes seemed to turn several shades greyer as he looks from Thoros to Melisandre. "At a price, friend. But one I'd long since made up my mind about paying."

"You," Sandor cuts in. "Old man. I know you. You saw the sack of King's Landing, didn't you? Who are you?"

The man's face falls as his eyes turn to Sandor and he lets the shorter Thoros out of the hug. A hardness grows behind his irises, and behind that, Sandor sees only a shred of the same disillusionment from nearly twenty years ago.

"Aye," comes the reply. "Or rather I saw the smoking ruins after Tywin Lannister was done with it. My last battle of the war was at the Trident with Ned Stark. You're the Hound?"

"You've got to have heard the mob shouting my name."

"And your brother destroyed House Targaryen's future."

"Not yet," says Melisandre. "You have come seeking the Dragon Queen. You, Thoros of Myr; you have seen the same visions in the flames I have. Daenerys Targaryen, her armies and dragons beneath the Wall, Lightbringer tearing through the Army of the Dead, the Great Other walking the earth."

The drunk shrugs. "I've seen fractions of them, yes. But, the Lord of Light might have a different say, priestess. It appears he believes Jon Snow is the Prince Who Was Promised."

Melisandre seems to pause at that, her hardened eyes cracked and her implacable lips frowning. Mormont looms over her like a statue.

"Perhaps," she replies flatly. "You are looking well, Lord Beric. Have you died again since we last met?"

Beric glares at her, his rage for the slain smallfolk not quite abated. "No," he answers through clenched teeth. "Had I, I would not have had the heart to leave the Lord a seventh time."

"Nor would I have blamed you had you remained in his arms," admits Melisandre.

"I may, before this war is done," Beric says. "Who is this new priest you bring with you?"

Melisandre inclines her head politely, and gestures to her armored companion with one slender and gentle arm. "No new priest," she replies. "Only another soldier in the Great War. Before you stands Lord Jorah Mormont of Bear Island, Queensguard to Daenerys Targaryen."

"Last I'd heard of you," Thoros begins. "You'd fled into the depths of Essos. How'd you get back to Westeros?"

"I would never have left Daenerys unless I was a dead man," Jorah breathes. "Then I was. Greyscale. I sailed from Braavos to White Harbor, tried to get to Bear Island. I wanted to die in the land of my fathers, at least."

"I found him," Melisandre interrupts, laying a palm on the pauldron of Jorah's armor. "His flesh corrupting, his mind going, and I offered him a cure by fire. In return, he will bring me into the Mother of Dragons' good graces so I might prepare her for the war to come. Who is it that you bring with you?"

Her eyes fall implicitly on Sandor. Before something witty and acidic can come to mind, Thoros answers for her.

"Sandor Clegane, former Kingsguard to Joffrey Baratheon, Lord of Clegane's Keep," he announces. "He's the one what laid into those peasants." Melisandre approaches Sandor, her green eyes roving about his face as if he's some kind of lavish carving she's searching for imperfections. No doubt she could find many.

"I saw you, fighting on the shores of the Blackwater, so long ago," she muses. Her voice is soft and seems to be directed at the air rather than anyone in particular. So much darkness in you, Clegane. You have known the Lord of Light R'hllor before. Haven't you?"

A flawless hand emerges from Melisandre's robe and traces the ropes of melted flesh at his brow; a defect discovered. Every instinct tells Sandor he should pull away from her, but something about her touch is darkly magnetic, as though, even in this world of bright sand and bright sun, there is an amoral force of nature granting this woman power that no man could stand against.

"Darkness is but the child of fire," she continues. "And fire is the blood of the Lord of Light. You are one who has gained his favor, who will not split hairs, who will do whatever must be done to win the day. We will need more like you, for the Great War."

"I won't be burning any children," he replies.

"Nor will the Lord ask it of you."

"Guess he leaves all that filthy shit to you."

"'He ran. Not very fast.'"

Melisandre smiles as the words leave her mouth, her eyes boring into Sandor's; she knows exactly what she's done and drags him from his unlikely high horse with one light tug. The words echo in his head, his voice and hers melding together into a single genderless recitation, words she could never have known unless she had breathed life back into Ned Stark himself. Sandor decides, then and there, that this woman terrifies him.

A sound like fury personified crashed against five pairs of ears. Dust shook from the sides of buildings and ripped itself from the ground. Sandor felt his sword tremble in its scabbard as the roar grew louder, like the metal itself was afraid of whatever creature had just thundered over Yronwood. Loose pieces of armor vibrated against Sandor's mail. The roaring continues, punctuated by what sounded like the unfurling of colossal sails. Some of the bodies littering the street buffet across the ground while tempests of dust roil through the air. From across Yronwood, the screams are heard, cries of terror one hears when death itself descends from the skies. But there is no hint of battle or disaster in the distance. Melisandre smiles. Jorah falls to his knees, his lips trembling and his eyes shining.

The dragons pass by as titanic blurs that displace the wind itself. Sandor's eyes turn to the heavens long before they soar over, and he still only catches their colors; one giant and black, and a smaller pair in emerald and gold.

Jorah throws back his head, tears flowing down his face, and even with the booming howls of the dragons overhead, he can hear the Northman's bellow of . . .

"_KHALEESI_!"


	9. Daenerys III

DAENERYS

The first thing Daenerys feels as she plants her feet upon Westeros is perplexed.

The evening's only begun to take over from afternoon, and the sun still splashes Yronwood in glittering gold, the muddy dappled bricks of Lord Anders' tower illuminated on their seaward face. It is barely a tenth of the height of Meereen's Great Pyramid, though some of the stones are the same color as that far-flung eastern monument. The docks had been full of other ships at only noon this day, when the ironman scouting detachments had come back with news of a port sighted. There'd been a great cheer, thousands of voices and ships strong, mixed in with the undulating, exuberant cries of a hundred thousand seasick Dothraki eager to feel dirt and grass beneath their feet again. Columns of celebratory fire had split the midday, salty air, as Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion realized they'd soon soar over more than empty ocean.

Now, as far as the eye can see, the harbor is crowded with a forest of dragon-imprinted sails, the air bursting with conversations and shouts in Common and uncommon Tongue. Unsullied donned their spiked helmets and light cuirasses, marching off of Balerion and other ships in hundred-man formations bristling with at least as many speartips. Those warrior-eunuchs too young or injured to be soldiers labored efficiently; huge stores and crates of weapons, armor, food, pieces of siege equipment and more pile high upon the wooden piers the ships have been tied to. Grey Worm was somewhere among them, keeping the peace between his men and the Dornishmen whose streets they were crowding, per Daenerys' instructions. She'd also been careful to command Qhono and the mounted Dothraki to leave through Yronwood's southern gate, lest any of his opportunistic men decide to take what they liked of the fortress' food or women and start some battle not even she could stop.

Gulls caw. Bells ring. The surf bubbles as it's dragged from the rocks below Daenerys' feet. The harbor smells of salt and wet stone and human sweat. Daenerys had grown weary of all three on their voyage; she was a dragon, and dragons were as distant from the sea and rock as day is to night. Awestruck children watch the disembarking from behind boulders and animal styes and second-story windows before parents hurry them into a premature bedtime. They whisper to each other I didn't know they could curve swords and I've never seen a girl with white hair before and on the edge of normal volume they exclaim Lizards can't fly!

But still her perplexity endures. For all its newness, all its pale people and strange accents, all the foreign architecture, and the almost divinely sweet air, this could very well be some mountain-flung fortress in Essos. She's seen forests like those that rise upon the seaward cliffs, years ago on her ride from Pentos to Vaes buildings are the same color as the rocky deserts that hugged the waters of Slaver's Bay. Some of the onlooking Dornishmen could have been mistaken for a Yunkai'i to an untrained eye. Daenerys finds herself wishing hers were untrained, so all these minute differences would pass her by and she could truly feel as though she was in Westeros, and not some otherworld copy of this land or that from her past.

But in her mind, she knows she's home. As she crosses from wooden pier onto dusty street stones, Tyrion, Varys, Missandei, and the Greyjoys trailing behind her, the notion that she's finally set foot in her country takes root, and her heart erupts in fire.

A party strides to meet Daenerys and her advisors from a raised stone-floored pavilion across the street intersecting the endless rows of piers. There are five of them, flanked by an assortment of guards; some carried swords and shields and were bedecked in bulky, shining silver armor adorned painted, yellow roses. Others were darker-skinned, clad in light mail and red or yellow robes, their caps spiked and wrapped in cloth.

Varys pads silently to her side, the only indication he was even there the saccharine, cloying stench of his perfumes. One ringed finger flicks towards the approaching group, directly specifically at two of the women in the center. The movement is so slight one might question if it had been made at all. But many of the Spider's movements were so subtle, physical or otherwise.

"Ellaria Sand, Your Grace," Varys whispers, lush and gentle, as he indicates the long-necked, imperious looking woman. Her mouth was sullen and her eyes heavy-lidded and cruel. Behind Ellaria followed three young Dornish women in fighting leathers, exotic spears at their sides. "De facto ruler of Dorne since she murdered the men of House Martell. My advice? Keep her and Tyrion as far from one another as possible."

"Will she serve a Targaryen loyally?" Daenerys whispered back.

"Most likely, my Queen," comes the reply. "Her country did fight for your father. But the presence of a Lannister in our ranks might just cause her to send her armies back to Sunspear. We can count definitively on Olenna Tyrell's support." Another point of a finger, this time at the grizzled old woman keeping fair pace with Ellaria Sand. Her dress is black, riddled with golden embroidering, and is a little loose on her thin, aged body. Swallowing most her head is a black toque hat with another golden rose sewn in directly in its center. Despite her age, she moves with the pride and arrogance of one conditioned to luxury long before she'd actually attained it.

"She will adjust to Tyrion's presence, or we will move on Sunspear and replace her with someone who will," Daenerys finished. The two groups are only a few meters from each other now.

"I can only hope, Your Grace," Varys sighed. "I've always considered Dornish beauty so corrupted by vindictive rage. Unfortunately, the Princess Sand does not seem to share my concern."

"Oh, my friend," says Tyrion as he sidles up alongside the bald eunuch, his voice low enough to suit his own malformed height. "I've heard it said Lady Olenna was quite a beauty in her day, if Dornish women so displease you."

Daenerys meant to lean her head in their direction and say "enough", but as the parties met, Olenna Tyrell let out a loud, decidedly unladylike chuckle.

"I remember settling the matter with Lord Varys long ago, Lord Tyrion," she rasps, her brittle fingers snaking around each other. Daenerys had seen newborn snakes in Essos writhe about in similar, revolting meshes. "What was it I said to you in the gardens all those years ago, Spider?"

Varys inclined his soft, round scalp and held out two long-sleeved arms in an elegant greeting. "I believe it was 'what happens when the nonexistent bumps against the decrepit?'"

Olenna's eyes widened as if in sudden, exaggerated realization. The combined Tyrell/Martell retinue surrounded them, mixed in with the most deadly of Daenerys' Unsullied.

"Yes, of course," she replied. "A jest I don't think these fighting statues of yours will halfway appreciate." The warrior-eunuchs she spoke of stood motionless, their eyes staring blankly forward.

"Trust me when I say they're learning to appreciate a good joke," said Tyrion, extending his hand to Olenna and furrowing his heavy brow when she plainly ignored the gesture. "A jolly lot, I think. I swear they are beaming under their helms."

"I suppose so," Olenna huffs, grinning slightly. She examines the dwarf with kinder eyes Daenerys had expected from a woman who'd just lost her entire family. Simply more casualties, more victims of the Lannisters currently bestriding the Iron Throne; Queen Cersei had levelled the Sept of Baelor, Daenerys' ancestor, and with it had turned to ash Olenna's son, grandson and granddaughter, along with the hope of growing any more golden roses to rule in Highgarden. For a woman with so barbed a tongue as to be named Queen of Thorns, Daenerys is surprised she is holding herself together quite so well. Though, she knows all too well that revenge is a potent salve for grief. "Now don't you think you owe an apology to our lovely Dornish maids, little lion, for daring to suggest our eunuch friend is not palpitating with lust the moment he sees them?"

"I'm sorry, Lady Olenna?"

Ellaria spat on the ground at Tyrion's feet, and Daenerys can practically see the emerald flick of a snake's tongue in her mouth, scaly hackles rising and full of hatred as she hisses at him. The girls trailing behind her are implacable and quiet, though they eye Daenerys' Hand with some kind of blood-hungry curiosity.

"I have nothing to say to you, Lannister," Ellaria growls. "You will rule over me the day Oberyn returns from the dead."

Daenerys steps forward, a ringed hand light on the shoulder of Tyrion's thick, black doublet.

"I will rule over you," she says, the fire still bursting in her heart and making her whole body tingle. She was a dragon, a dragon finally secure in its lair, and before her gnashed only a wrathful worm. "As your rightful Queen, Princess Ellaria. You will leave my Hand be, or I may suddenly remember who the victims of your own rise to power were."

Clenching her jaw, Ellaria takes a step back and says no more. Missandei strides forward, her wiry hair tied into a tight, coarse bun atop her head, her gait confident and humble and totally unlike the mousy shuffle she'd had when Daenerys had first met her in Astapor.

"My Lady Olenna, Princess Ellaria," she announces, the swift dip of her chin angled high and her face smiling. "You stand in the presence of Daenerys Targaryen, First Of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Protector of the Realm, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms, Queen of Meereen, The Unburnt, The Khaleesi of the Dothraki Sea, The Stormborn, The Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons."

All the Dornish present knelt deeply, until some with longer hair felt their dark curls almost touch the ground. Their robes flared in wavy, sunburst patterns of scarlet and gold upon the ground. Daenerys could practically feel all of Dorne kneel with Ellaria. The first of seven Kingdoms had bent the knee to her. Her first Westerosi subjects bowed before her. She was surrounded by them now, every man and woman who had cleared the streets to avoid the march of the Unsullied, every child who had watched her Dothraki and her dragons roll into Westeros. Every human being for a hundred miles in any direction, all of them belonged to her now, depended on her to keep them safe and provide for them. She remembers, suddenly, the long history between the Targaryen Iron Throne and Dorne. Dragon and viper were the closest cousins in Westeros.

When the Lady of Sunspear rises, the wrath that had stenciled her face from the moment Daenerys had first seen her is gone. Ellaria smiles pleasantly, or as close to pleasantly a woman so hard of heart can smile.

"Forgive my runaway tongue, Your Grace," the older woman suggests. "It has been years since I lost my Oberyn, since my girls lost their father, and my heart has still not healed. Dorne is yours, and all ten thousand spears it can muster. I apologize for Lord Anders' absence. Some violence in the town earlier disturbed him, and he has not left his fortress since."

Daenerys sighs in relief, but it's quiet enough to disguise as a lone breath. False pleasantries thrown up to smokescreen rage are something she can work with.

"You are forgiven," she replies. "Lord Yronwood's fear is understandable. I will take up residence in his castle tonight, until I and my armies can march north. Lady Olenna, I assume the swords of the Reach are mine as well?"

"You won't find me kneeling, dear," the old woman admitted. "Not unless you want to roll me about in a wheelchair for the rest of my short days. And I'm not fighting for you because I care about who sits their ass on that throne. I'm doing it because I think that the look on Cersei's face as the Red Keep melts around her will make a fine portrait to hang in my castle. But we'll see if she's alive long enough for a painter to commit it to memory. And we'll see if you impress me until then, dear. Highgarden stands with you."

"I will do my best."

"Minimal effort should do the job, Your Grace. It shan't take much to outshine our last few Kings."

Tyrion clears his throat. "Shall we be expecting some accommodations for the Queen's court?" he asked, his tone reinforced with extra geniality should Ellaria be thinking about ordering her guards to kill him right now. Looking at the woman now, Daenerys can't see past her forced amicability, can't see what is sincere beyond her submission to the Targaryen crown; a viper, camouflaged against harmless, decaying leaves.

"Yronwood and Martell have always had some dribbles of bad blood between them, Your Grace," Ellaria says. "I haven't visited this castle in some time. Lord Anders' runners will be here shortly to escort you to your chambers." She eyed Tyrion with a piercing stare, though the smile remains caked upon her face. "All of you." The dwarf grinned to himself, probably imagining some comical, bloody fate Ellaria had in mind for him, and the other struck by the realization that only she was vicious enough to make those exaggerated fears come to life.

"We'll all feast on olives and lemons and peppers and get fat until you decide what we'll be throwing soldiers at, Your Grace," Olenna interjected, gripping Daenerys' hand in her own veiny, learned one. The Tyrell matriarch looks her in the eye and nods. "Let's hope you delay a bit. Old squabbles kept me from coming down here, but they didn't keep me from getting a Dornish cook. I do love their food."

"Perhaps this cook will have to serve his Queen when I take power in King's Landing."

"Perhaps, dear." Olenna drew her hand back, snapping her fingers. Her heavy-plated guards closed in around her like a great silver muscle, and she began to extricate herself from the armored circle of noble delegates. As the Tyrell retinue headed away from the docks and in the general direction of the mud-colored tower lording over Yronwood, a ringed hand shot from the columns of spears. "You know where to find me, Your Grace!" Olenna's voice rang.

Ellaria watched the detachment of the Martells' ancient rivals go, and it seemed to all that Olenna's sudden departure had signalled the end of the highborn pleasantries for now. Daenerys disliked seeing the older woman go; she liked her already, as much as she disliked Ellaria. The Dornish woman simply bowed and strided haughtily after Olenna with a single "Your Grace".

"I like the pale one," Missandei said, to no one in particular.

It was a long time until the runner from the castle came to bring them into Lord Yronwood's hall. The sun had dipped behind the great tower as evening came. In its shadow the wind blew longer, and colder, tearing off the shifting waters and buffeting Daenerys' crimson sash. Varys looked like a great sheet, his loose robes fluttering about him, with only his egglike scalp visible from amongst the decadent folds. Missandei's cheeks had begun to redden from windburn, and she tried to turn away from the gale to little avail. Only Yara and Theon seemed at ease. The roughspun cloaks around their necks might have been torn each and every way by the wind, and they might have had to squint as it hit them straight in the face, but they looked right at home. Or, at least Yara did. Theon always seemed to be staring at something far away his eyes wide in a kind of terror beyond terror. He rarely looked at home anywhere.

Before she had known it, torches had been lit at the prows of her ships, work begun in light now prolonged in the dark. The supplies seemed endless; crates and crates and crates stacked higher than the piers were tall, Unsullied barking to each other in Valyrian and wearing armor so black they seem to be mere outlines of nightshade moving through the dusk.

Finally, when even Dany had thought she could bear the wind no more, a man had moved through the deserted streets towards them, a torch illuminating the black, chained gate sigil of House Yronwood on his tan breastplate. He had been rudimentarily handsome, with thick brown hair and hard eyes the color of the sea, but his looks were diluted by a pinchedness around his nose and brow, as though he was always scowling, and his lazy left eye. He'd introduced himself as Ser Cletus Yronwood, son of Anders the Bloodroyal, sent to retrieve Queen Daenerys and her court and lodge them. Sighing in relief, everyone got up, and thus the trudge through a deserted Yronwood had begun. As the evening sped into night, the world turned indigo, and the whole journey found Daenerys trying to ignore the stares of an overly confident Ser Cletus at her rear. She'd had half a mind to abandon him and pad through the dark town herself.

But that had been before her meal, enjoyed on the plush heaven of the Bloodroyal's own bed after he had offered it to her, his smile sparkling like quartz, in lieu of an inferior room in the castle's various wings. The peppers had scorched her mouth so beautifully, the exotic fruits filling her mouth with a firebomb of rainbow flavors, the lizard-lion meat savory and tender. Daenerys decided, as the last sliver passed her lips and Missandei unbraids her hair, the two of them speaking of the future, that, yes, she would have to employ Olenna Tyrell's cook in King's Landing some day soon.

Now, it was just her and Tyrion, listening to the torches in the Great Hall crackle. The seat of the Bloodroyal was not as lavish as she'd heard the Iron Throne, but neither was it as cruelly flanges as that barbed chair in King's Landing. It rose from the stone of the very floor, smooth stone the color of white bread crust, chiseled at its sides and arms into ornate panoramas of ancient Bloodroyals tall and armored amidst the Red Mountains.

It is not the most comfortable throne, increasingly cold on her bottom and elbows, but it is a throne she sits astride; a Westerosi one. The first of many.

Daenerys sighs, and the promise of completing one's life's goal fills her lungs like a mouthful of flames.

"How does it feel?" Tyrion breaks the silence. The dwarf pushes off of the stair-step he'd been leaning on and approaches the throne with light steps that barely have time to reach Daenerys' ears before they fade into the dark reaches of the dim room. "These steps are quite high, even to you larger folk. Does it terrify you, how high your new seat rises over the floor, the way you can lord over the rest of us? Or maybe it excites you, to be at journey's end so soon."

"I feel almost fulfilled," replies Daenerys. "Not scared. I was made for this. It's in my blood."

Tyrion smirks. "But is it what you want?" he chuckles. "I for one want to live long and whore often. Neither was expected of me with my stunted legs and my poor sword arm. Yet here I am, revered by tavern girls from White Harbor to Oldtown, seeing the first slivers of grey in my beard. One can tell you were made for ruling with one look. But what do you want, Daenerys the Stormborn?"

"The Iron Throne," she answers immediately.

"And why do you want it?"

"For peace. For everyone's peace. So that the people are able to live their lives undisturbed and unoppressed. Ser Jorah once told me that all the smallfolk pray for is rain, healthy children and a summer that never ends. Who was the last ruler whose reign left the people only wanting for those things?"

"None that I have met, and I have met a great deal of them, Your Grace."

"I intend to be the first monarch in a very long time to sit on that throne and bring the Lords of Westeros to heel. I will be fulfilled when no peasant ever need fear his Lord's wrath on a whim, when he should never dread being pressganged into fighting for a noble that would not fight for him."

"Good," Tyrion said as he smiled at her, his faith in her strengthened even further than when she'd burned the Ghiscari slavers in Meereen. Daenerys hears brisk footsteps echoing from the shadowed corridor that led into the castle's bowels, the sounds of steps heavy with something important. Her first supplicant, perhaps? "You must have something driving you to keep the Throne from consuming you. Some choose war, some choose gold and some choose the gods, just trying to keep from being overwhelmed and corrupted by the power of it all. For Robert, it was vice. For your father, it was his own madness. Whatever it might be, you have to have another cup to drink from when the sway you have over men becomes too sweet. Joffrey had none. Neither does my sister."

Daenerys' face tightened, her brow contracting and knitting in sudden annoyance. "One might think another cautionary tale of my family's insanity is coming, Lord Hand," she warns, distancing him with his highborn honorific.

Tyrion shakes his shaggy head, the smile only halfway disappearing. Below his beard, his jaw is wide and relaxed, his eyes moony and lashing directly to hers.

"If Robert could hear you now," he breathes, the edge of his mouth trembling as he tries to force down the smirk coming back in force. "The wine it would take to calm his rage, at one's daring to include him in the ranks of the 'dragon-spawn'! Joffrey? Oh! King's Landing would have been scoured clean of small, innocent animals to feed his passions. Cersei, though, she might just swoon at being allowed to wear the name Targaryen. The things she would have liked to do with poor oblivious Rhaegar . . ." Tyrion's grin breaks upon his face all at once, like the popping of an ember in a fire. Wistfully he sighs, as if he wishes to return to the days where Cersei Lannister and Rhaegar Targaryen had seemed a possible match. "I mean no disrespect, Your Grace.

"The Targaryens are a great dynasty to be sure, but there are hundreds of thrones they don't occupy, around the world. There are mad rulers everywhere. Cruel rulers. It's simply what happens when you give ultimate power to those who aren't worthy of it. You must be more than made for ruling Westeros, Daenerys. You must be worthy of it."

"And am I?" Daenerys asks, clenching a fist upon the bulbed arm of her chair. The arm of the throne is made of older stone than the rest. It is pitted and worn, miniature craters networking its surface that scratch upon her palm as she grips it tight. The footsteps from the corridor grow louder. "Worthy of it?"

"Only journey's end can say. But I believe you are. Grey Worm does. So does Missandei. Varys does. The Greyjoys and Martells and the last Tyrell agree with me. Qhono and all his Dothraki- your Dothraki believe in you. Daario Naharis still does, and Jorah Mormont, if he lives still."

"I miss him, Tyrion," Daenerys practically whispers. In the near-silence of the room, even such a quiet utterance played off all the walls, the acoustics bending the noise until it sounded like a chorus of breathy nothings coming from all around them.

"He is a good man. For all his flaws, they were born out of love. That's more than one could say for me, no?"

Before Jorah's absence or her own doubts can loom any larger, a figure melts out of the black corridor, his leather armor nearly one with the inky nothing around him. His gait is limber and fearless, his arms folded behind his back. As he crosses into the throne room proper, Grey Worm's face is wrought into orange being by the twin torches in sconces flanking the doorway. He is as clean and spartan as ever. The only perceivable chink in Grey Worm's militant uniformity was a dash of clingy, pale powder across his left cheek. Daenerys remembered with a blush that Missandei had applied a thin layer of a very similar cosmetic to her face after Daenerys had finished supper and they'd parted for the night. If the Unsullied commander notices it, he lets no one know. He ascends the room's steps until he is level with Daenerys and greets her with an incline of his shaven head.

"My Queen," he rumbles in trilling Valyrian. "My Lord Hand. There is a party from a 'Brotherhood Without Banners' here to see you. They bring a Red Priestess from Asshai with them."

"Have they said why they are here, Torgo Nudho?" Daenerys replies.

"Only that they come as friends," the eunuch answers. One black-gloved hand tightens around the hilt of a glittering shortsword tucked in his belt. "I will remain here, in case they do not. Though . . ." His voice trails off and Grey Worm tries to disguise a smile. It was a rare thing to see on his face, so hardened it was after years of slavery and indignity. But, when viewed, it was as if the sun itself had burst upon his cheeks. "I think that you will be pleased they have come, My Queen."

She nods Grey Worm's way, and the Unsullied commander falls in beside her throne, statue-like, again the picture of martial tensity.

"You fought in the War of The Five Kings, Tyrion," Daenerys says. "Have you ever heard of this Brotherhood?"

"I nearly watched it form, Your Grace," the dwarf begins. "Ned Stark gathered up a few naive Lords and empty-headed boys before the war began and sent them after the Mountain when he was razing the Riverlands for the sport of it. More flocked to the side of this righteous band of brothers until they severed ties with all sides in the war, proclaiming themselves the protectors of whatever common folk were in need, forgotten by the high Lords in their arrogance. I trust, Grey Worm, that all three hundred Brotherhood members are not waiting just outside this room for us?"

"No, my Lord Hand. Only their leaders," Grey Worm replies.

"I will hear them," says Daenerys, before Tyrion can ask any more questions. It had been night for what felt like ages. With the fullness of a meal in her stomach and absent the tightness of her, her whole body is telling her that her day is over. Already Daenerys feels her eyelids grow so heavy that her amethyst eyes are sliced into half-moons. The sooner these Brotherhood men are sent on their way, the better. "Bring them to me."

Grey Worm nods, treads down the steps and disappears once more into the depths of the castle. A few minutes later he returns, four more Unsullied following him. Their masked faces are pits of nothingness in the low light as they flank the door, roundshields up and spears high. Again Grey Worm ascends the steps, and again he takes a rigid grip of the sword at his flank, his teeth clenched and his spine straight as an arrow.

The group that follows the Unsullied was a collection of contradictions. The first three, men in battered knight's armor and assorted hunks of metal or leather, look tired. All three of them are old; one has the crimson stain of wine cloying at his weirdly pale chin, while the man behind him has whiskers like a walrus and covers a missing eye with a ragged patch of cloth tied about his head. The third is burned from forehead to ear on his right cheek. It was a terrible patchwork, a weaving of slickened sinews that must have only barely held onto his face as the rest of it burned away. Daenerys feels her heart go out to him, regardless of the way his eyes observed her with frozen killer's instinct. The Mother of Dragons has seen enough of what her children wrought to know what his injury must have felt like.

The three tired, scabbed old men before her contrast utterly with the woman behind them. She is red in all the most beautiful, terrible ways, from her robes to her hair to the jewelry around her neck. She has cold eyes, like the burned knight, but the unearthly sensuality wafting off of her almost makes up for it. Daenerys recognizes all of it; this must be the Red Priestess. Similarly-dressed men and women had come to Meereen in her absence, helping to keep the pride of the Bay of Dragons from sliding down the rungs of chaos.

"Who stands before the Dragon Queen?" Daenerys asks. The attempt at fanfare isn't halfway as impressive or clearly spoken as when Missandei introduces her, but for a darkened hall with not even half her council present, it will do.

The drunk and the one-eyed man both draw their swords, and Grey Worm, hyperattentive of the room, goes for his in a black flash. Daenerys waves him off. Driving their blades into the stone floor, they kneel. The one with the eyepatch looks up at her, and under all that beard, the hint of what might have once been a dashing smile crosses his face.

"Your Grace," he says in a deep, smooth voice. "I am Lord Beric Dondarrion of Blackhaven, and net to me," he gestured to the long-haired, beady-eyed man kneeled beside him. "Is Thoros of Myr. We are both Red Priests, baptized in the fiery ichor of the Lord of Light R'hllor. We come to you to serve you, defend you, and counsel you on how best you might serve the Lord's will. In return, we ask only that you listen to us."  
"I have not stayed awake long into the night for nothing, Lord Beric. Rise," Daenerys replied, smiling down at the aging noble. Beric and Thoros of Myr rose from the floor and sheathed their weapons once more. "R'hllor's chosen were friends to me during my time in Essos. They shall have my ear here. Say to me what you will, Red Priests."

Beric opens his mouth to speak, but behind him the Priestess lays a hand on his shoulder. Something unspoken is registered between them and Beric nods before falling back beside the burned knight. Daenerys already dislikes her; maybe because Beric reminded her a little of Jorah, maybe because she hadn't bothered with a bow or a 'Your Grace' or any of the sycophancy Daenerys knew she deserved.

"I am Melisandre of Asshai, my Queen," the Priestess begins. "I have traveled a very long way and waited a very long time in this strange country. I believe I have been waiting for you. You were born amid salt and smoke, and you have woken dragons out of stone. Here you now sit, the mightiest monarch of our time, come to rule over your seven kingdoms and drive out the turncoats in fire and blood."

Daenerys feels obligated to blush. Maybe this Melisandre wasn't irredeemable after all. "That's the plan, Priestess," she confirms.

Melisandre almost looks as if she hasn't heard her at all, the only indication a slight twitch in her downcast, almost-too-pink lips.

"What if I told you there was another ruler?" she continued. "One who wants more than just your throne."

"We've met half of them already," Tyrion cuts in, raising an eyebrow suspiciously in the Red Priestess's direction. "So have you, or so I hear. Who's favor was harder to gain, Stannis Baratheon's or Jon Snow's?"

Melisandre plainly ignored the dwarf's comments, eyes remaining affixed to Daenerys only. Daenerys is not so dismissive of her Hand, however. She shudders inwardly as she always does at the utterance of the name Baratheon. But knowing this woman had served the King In The North? Had Jon Snow sent them, as his reply to Tyrion's letters? Perhaps the letters had not yet made it to Winterfell, but heresay of Daenerys' arrival had, and Snow had sent envoys to refuse her.

Or are Melisandre and her Brotherhood here to extoll the virtues of their God to her? She'd known no deities for so many years, not the Seven or the Old Gods or even the dusty forgotten gods of old Valyria. Then she had met Khal Drogo, and absorbed the Great Stallion of his father's father into her heart. There it still looms, smaller than it was, but still rearing and snorting; a token belief to keep her husband's memory alive. All the same, Daenerys has no more room for the Lord of Light to occupy.

"This ruler is not born from salt or smoke," Melisandre resumes. "He is conjured when men rest, when men dream, and when men die. He does not wake dragons from stone, but legions of the dead rise from their sleep at his call. He saw the First Men come and colonize these lands. He saw the Andals arrive after them. He saw when Ghis fell to Valyria, and when Valyria fell to the gods themselves. Night is his crown. Ice his armor. Death his throne. He does not want to rule over mankind, my Queen; only to wipe us off the face of this world."

The room was silent for a long moment afterwards. The grim words, true or invented, certainly made the shadows leer longer and darker, their edges growing bolder and more gritty as though they were pressing in on the lonely-seeming torches. Daenerys put her hand in her lap. It suddenly felt far safer there than in the black tendrils of the shadows burning along the arm of her throne.

"I met him before on the Wall," Tyrion says, unable to keep the mirthy grin from his mouth. "Surely the years haven't hardened Jon Snow as much as all that."

"The King In The North is not your enemy, Stormborn," the Red Priestess assures. "What news I have come bearing . . . it can't be given in a single night." Now comes the subservience; the bowing, the smiling, a tone of voice that sounds so subtly genial. Finally Melisandre, too, kneels. "Swear me and my Brotherhood into your service, and you will know all that we know. R'hllor can show you where your fury is most needed, and where it is not."

The advantages are quick to spring forth in Daenerys' mind. Red Priests were known for their eldritch powers, their abilities to snake flames between their fingers like yarn, and to divine the future from nothing but crackling fire. What could the current powers of Westeros do against the Lord of Light himself? What secrets could they still keep? What armor would keep a man safe from a blaze? The Brotherhood's three hundred swords meant little in an army of near two hundred thousand men, but every blade was welcome.

But soon come the drawbacks. The fanaticism R'hllor inspired in his followers . . . what would the Dothraki think when their Khaleesi is seen taking counsel from those who insist their Great Stallion is a demon? Or the ironmen and their Drowned God? Would Melisandre and Lord Beric insist that their idols be burned? That Daenerys herself convert?

And burning bright is the star of fear she'd felt as Mirri Maz Duur had worked unknowable, evil forces into her; the desolation of Daenerys' life that the maegi deeds had left behind.

Could she trust those in service to similar powers?

Her silence as she considers her options prompts Melisandre to speak up once more.

"We have brought a gift for you, Your Grace," she says. "I and the Brotherhood hope that he's a satisfactory payment of good faith." She turns to the corridor behind the Brotherhood party, her robes billowing slightly near the hem. "Ser, we are ready for you."

Her mind flashing back to the overly-familiar looks of Cletus Yronwood, dread fills Daenerys. If it is some pompous, cow-headed brute of a knightly suitor they have for her, or a ceremonial, jewel-laiden sword she would never use, or a chunk of holy iconography whose significance was lost on her . . .

He moves through the darkness, out of it, the torches carving out great portions of his rugged, stubbly face from the black corridor. She's seen him this way so many times; sword in hand, sheathed in armor, treading out of the night to rescue her from anything in the world she couldn't withstand; returning to her, as time had taught Daenerys he always would. The miracle of his appearance almost strikes her dumb when she realizes who it is. How long ago had she and Tyrion been speaking of him, the scar his absence had left on her. And now here he is, brough into Daenerys' world again by her own sheer need for him, walking up the steps faster than she ever could, but just as quick to kneel before her, admiration emitting from him in golden bands.

Daenerys tugs on Jorah's arm fiercely, and he rises. His blue eyes bore into hers, and she strokes his face from cheek to jawline. Everyone else is gone. It's only the two of them, just like it's been since she walked into the fire.

"Khaleesi-" He starts to say.

Daenerys pulls him to her, her grip like a vice, and lets the tears flow as forcefully and noisily as they want. She is a Queen whether she cries or not. As his arms close about her shoulders, she knows that her heart has come home.


End file.
